During the 2009 holiday shopping rush, a popular computer maker encountered an embarrassing problem—its vaunted facial-recognition program failed to register black faces. Much of the ensuing media discussion noted that such software was still in its infancy. It makes sense that computers would be confused about race. After all, their creators are often equally clueless.

Much American racial ignorance probably stems from our stubborn insistence on “recognizing” race in the first place. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” Nell Irvin Painter reminds us in her impressive new book, The History of White

A noun followed by a colon and a claim to greatness—whether Coal: A Human History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, it’s a formula with proven publishing legs. As these smartly packaged microhistories train their writers’ full powers of research and analysis on undervalued or overlooked topics, they can, in skilled hands, elevate humble subjects to glorious heights—and argue convincingly for their importance on the world stage. However, as deployed in Steven Solomon’s exhaustive new Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, the strategy of the close

A born rambler, Justine Kurland has been traveling across America with a camera for the past decade. In 2004, when her son, Casper, was born, she took him along for the ride. Their camping van soon became crammed with toy trains; Casper’s enthusiasm for locomotives was infectious, and Kurland’s work began to explore real railways, as well as the train hoppers and hobos she met along the way. Like any parent, she also frequently aimed her camera at her child, as he toddled through the blighted and bountiful landscape of America’s backwoods and slept in a cozy bed built into the van. In the

When Tsutomu Yamaguchi died two weeks ago, at 93, he was eulogized as a star-crossed rarity: a man who lived through two atomic blasts, at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki. He was a man with very good luck, or very bad luck. It’s hard to decide.

To complain that Americans don't read enough European fiction is to commit the mortal sin of extreme obviousness. The studied ignorance of literary fiction from anywhere besides the United States (and 99% of literary fiction from within the United States) has to be annoying to non-American authors, but they shouldn't feel alone—Americans ignore pretty much everything that comes out of Europe, with the possible exceptions of supermodels and sports cars. It's true that a few European authors have broken through in the States—Roddy Doyle, Stieg Larsson, Ian McEwan—but it's also true that as hard

In 1978, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe collaborated on an art show in New York that poet-critic Rene Ricard dubbed “Diary of a Friendship.” That could have been the corny subtitle of Just Kids, but the book⎯which is only occasionally corny and often deeply affecting⎯has none. Smith appends nothing market-friendly like “My Life with Robert Mapplethorpe,” probably for the same reason she uses, on the cover, a faded portrait of them taken at Coney Island in 1969 in lieu of a Mapplethorpe art photo. This is not a memoir of what these two became; it’s about their becoming.

They met in 1967,

However you feel after finishing Amy Bloom’s new collection of stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, you certainly won’t be at a loss to answer the question implied in its title. The action takes place, by and large, in living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Conversations prickling with decades of regret happen at the sink, as one speaker washes and the other dries. Reluctant lovers on long, slow collisions finally accept the inevitable in front of the television, with Greta Van Susteren supplying background music. Even when Bloom does send her characters off-property—to bars,

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas should be required reading for anybody considering a PhD in the humanities, especially now that the recession is driving more and more people into the supposedly safe haven of graduate school. In less than 200 pages, Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, examines the history and evolution of American higher education, and makes the case that the American university is suffering from a deep-seated institutional crisis that has grown rapidly more dire since the 1970s.

“It takes three years to become a lawyer,” Menand