Among the work of living artists, the oeuvre of Jasper Johns, or at least its first half, seems the least assailable of monuments. His breakthrough 1958 show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, featuring the iconic “Flag” paintings, resolved the impasse at which American painting found itself during Abstract Expressionism’s twilight stage; by reintroducing the image as well as the Duchampian readymade, and by creating works that emphasized flatness, Johns signaled the way toward both Pop art and Minimalism. The critically entrenched view of Johns imagines the artist as a crucial bridge between the muscular bravado of postwar

Historians of Los Angeles have tended, even when critical of the city, to re-inforce its long-standing reputation as a place of fantasy. Among the first to examine LA as an object of serious scholarship was Reyner Banham, who, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), imagined La La Land as a series of discrete laboratories for democratic life, an exciting but highly romanticized LA of sun, fun, and motoring. A generation later, that book found its dark opposite in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), which turned LA’s penchant for unreality against it, revealing a bloated science-fictional dystopia.

It’s not until the acknowledgments arrive on page 261 of Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur’s You Can’t Be President that readers learn the book was first conceived in French (and written jointly in French and English) as a means “to ‘explain’ U.S. democracy to a foreign audience.” The belated revelation explains quite a bit. For Gallic readers who often find themselves asking, “What’s the matter with the United States?” the account that MacArthur offers will serve as an excellent introduction to the distinctive dysfunctions of our democracy. But domestic prisoners trapped in the damned thing can probably afford to take

As someone who played Dungeons & Dragons obsessively from age nine through fourteen, I have my share of regrets, but they are as nothing when compared with those of Mark Barrowcliffe, an English novelist and ex-gamer, whose memoir, The Elfish Gene, chronicles a D&D habit the likes of which few people have known, or at least survived.

In historical photographs, events from long ago are easy to distinguish from more recent ones: The distant past is always in black-and-white. Even though experiments in color photography began in the mid-nineteenth century, color wouldn’t be widely used until the mid-1930s, and even then mainly for documentary and commercial purposes. But in 1909, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the Autochrome process, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated a twenty-two-year project (brought to an end by his ruin in the Great Depression) to photograph the world in color. Known as the Archives de la Planète, this astounding body

“Length is measured by the speed of a moving shadow. Is seaweed beautiful? A change in a narrative’s temporal modality rids us of our Cartesian arrogance—it’s autumn now, but back then it was spring. Is it possible to say that seaweed is much more beautiful than the dryness in your mouth?” These are lines from the first paragraphs of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Dust, a book of essays that is certain to rid its readers of any Cartesian arrogance when it comes to narrative.

IN STEVEN SEBRING’S DOCUMENTARY Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008), the godmother of punk is seen roaming cemeteries, scribbling in notebooks, reading poetry, and peeling open freshly snapped Polaroids. Smith’s music anchors the film, but Dream of Life’s unspoken theme is that she is an old-school romantic, one whose art-as-life approach to creativity makes her a sanguine torchbearer for the Beats and the nineteenth-century French poets she deeply admires.

Man was created a rebel,” Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor admonishes the silent Christ in his prison cell, “and how can rebels be happy?” The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding—or creating—one’s own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative, inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few. The rest of us cannot endure for long the tensions of uncertainty. We must, at some point, stop questioning, quiet our doubts, turn away from moral and metaphysical inquiry and toward life. Untrammeled skepticism ends in paralysis. This is true of societies as well as of individuals. No

The Barack Obama era will bring us many things, including, no doubt, a major motion picture. That may at first seem counterintuitive: After all, the story itself is certainly nowhere near completion. Asked during a Frost/Nixon junket interview in December, producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard agreed it was too early to talk about an Obama biopic. But the onetime Illinois senator’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, remains a much-discussed potential movie property, and with good reason: It’s a self-contained bildungsroman, written before Obama entered politics. While the forty-fourth president’s story may have just begun, the narrative

When, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history, he did so with mixed feelings. The good news, he thought, was that the ideological supremacy of free markets and of the political arrangement most suited to them (liberal democracy) had been established—even communists were talking about the importance of being competitive in the marketplace. The bad news was that without “the worldwide ideological struggle” between capitalism and socialism to inspire us, we were in for “a very sad time.” “In the post-historical period,” he wrote, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum