The financial and economic crisis now unfolding worldwide continues to generate much distressing sound and fury, but surely its most bizarre feature is a comparatively silent one: the lackluster reaction it has met at its epicenter in the United States. Neoliberalism—the essentially American ideological export that has governed global economic integration for three decades—has taken a serious, and perhaps fatal, blow. Alongside that failure have been calamities in America’s own business civilization and public life that are too numerous to count. But the broader implications of the passing of the neoliberal ideal don’t seem to have registered very widely.

On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president-elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, he explained that he did not mean the distinction negatively. While it was too soon to judge Obama as politician, Badiou stipulated, we could already judge him as actor, one who had broken with modern modes of self-presentation by returning to a classical style: sober, thoughtful, deliberate.

To be the child of true believers—whether religious zealots, political ideologues, or Cubs fans—is to learn from the cradle that beliefs have consequences. For Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose parents joined the Socialist Workers Party a few years before he was born in 1968, those consequences included poverty, abuse, and a promise of revolution as empty as it was constant. His tale of how utopian dreams led to both the dissolution of a marriage and a disillusioned childhood, When Skateboards Will Be Free, plays out like the fate of the past century’s revolutions in miniature: When things fall apart for the Sayrafiezadeh

In his introduction to The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, Harry Shearer leads off, naturally enough, with a joke: “Without Harvey Kurtzman, there would have been no Saturday Night Live. What a horrible thing to say about him, but it’s true. . . . OK, this might be better. Without Harvey Kurtzman, there would have been no Simpsons.”

Not only are computer-based works largely missing from histories of twentieth-century art, it is often hard to avoid the impression that blatant ignorance (as well as, sometimes, nonchalance) about the past reigns even among the artists, gallerists, and critics promoting such art today. One may always claim, of course, that digital art is still a newcomer yet to be embraced by the art world, but there is a considerable body of works, ideas, and theories that has been largely neglected by art curricula, critical discourses, and dominant institutions alike. As a consequence, contemporary digital artworks that manage to make their

A week after moving to New York, I hired a car service to take me to the commercial loading docks at Kennedy Airport. I was trying to pick up several cartons of books I had shipped from Paris. After signing for the contents, I proceeded to the Customs Office, where an agent was waiting to stamp the import papers. I had forgotten my passport; all I had was an expired, out-of-state driver’s license. “Kafka, eh?” he said, looking closely at the license, then at me. There was a pause. “I guess you must find this all pretty Kafkaesque!” He chortled—actually

Tennis may be a joy to play and a pleasure to watch, but it’s not a sport that lends itself easily to literary endeavor. The average tennis match has a few hundred largely indistinguishable points, and the scoring system reads like something out of a high school calculus book. An entire library devoted to the sport might be reduced a handful of volumes and one classic work of nonfiction, John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, published forty years ago.

As a retrospective of the work of Wassily Kandinsky makes its way from Munich to Paris to New York over the course of this year—roughly tracing the artist’s own westward path during his lifetime—fortunate viewers will experience one of the greatest concentrations of his art. Much as previous shows have presented piecemeal considerations of his body of work, so have publications tended toward examinations limited to certain media or particular periods. But to see the evolution of his painting is to witness the birth of a modernist master: early figurative canvases mixing French Impressionism and Fauvism with Russian folktales; the