This past holiday season, F. Scott Fitzgerald went from being considered a curse on Hollywood to the flavor of the month practically overnight. For decades, adaptations of Fitzgerald’s fiction were seen as surefire failures, but that all seemed to change with the release of David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the announcement that two new films were in the works: The Great Gatsby, to be directed by Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge), and something called The Beautiful and the Damned, which will be either an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s ambitious second novel or a biopic of the author

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night served as a muse for Geoff Dyer’s last work of fiction, Paris, Trance (1998), but the author admits that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the inspiration for his latest effort, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Pantheon, $24), never held much meaning for him. “It’s one of those books that’s part of the mythic template,” the award-winning essayist and consummate enthusiast, who has written on such wide-ranging subjects as photography, D. H. Lawrence, and World War I, explained to me on the phone while he was snowbound in London one February morning. Dyer

When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to “Damage, Inc.” and “I Am the Law.” If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me—the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had straight hair, grown long, and when they thrashed to the music, their hair bounced and

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,

Early in his new book of essays and reviews, George Scialabba declares himself a “utopian” and a “radical democrat,” though he concedes, parenthetically, that he owns up to this identification “on fewer days of the week than formerly.” It is the most succinct statement Scialabba provides of the sensibility governing What Are Intellectuals Good For?, which collects the work of more than two decades spent addressing the broadest philosophical and historical issues in five thousand words or fewer in the back pages of newspapers and magazines.

Scialabba is acutely conscious that the utopian impulse,