SIXTY YEARS AGO, MoMA’s landmark exhibition “Latin American Architecture Since 1945” surveyed the modernist tide then sweeping the region. Latin America in Construction looks at the quarter century that followed—the high period of desarrollismo (“developmentalism”), when governments of the most varied political complexions converged around a shared agenda of state-led growth. These were years of frantic urbanization—between 1950 and 1980, several major Latin American cities more than trebled in size—creating stark infrastructural challenges. As the book, an exhibition catalogue with accompanying essays, makes clear, they were also years of bold experimentation, as architects and planners from Mexico to the Southern

EVEN MARK COHEN’S early photographs look utterly contemporary. Most of the images in this volume, which spans 1969 to 2012, date from the ’70s and early ’80s, but their seemingly haphazard visual style—oddly canted perspectives, complex compositions, and a general fixation on disconnected parts of people and things—suggests nothing so much as the smartphone videos that are now a mainstay of our journalistic and voyeuristic consumption. Cohen seems to have anticipated this disorienting jumble of perspectives when he began taking photographs in his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, decades ago. He lived in that depressed but once-thriving industrial locale until recently, but

Princeton English professor Jeff Nunokawa has five thousand Facebook friends. I am one of them. If you are one of the other 4,999, it may be because you know his scholarly writings, such as The Afterlife of Property (1994) or Tame Passions of Wilde (2003). More likely, though, you’ve been drawn in by the brief, sometimes enigmatic meditations—Nunokawa calls them essays—he has been publishing daily on the social-networking site since 2007, a selection of which he’s now gathered in print as Note Book. The structure of Nunokawa’s daily entry is usually fivefold: a numbered title, followed by a quotation, often

“Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs,” remarked Theodor Adorno in his renowned compendium of aphoristic observations Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (1951). “Tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey.” For the literary scholar and cultural critic Andreas Huyssen, this evocative passage largely sums up the modernist miniature as he conceives it in his bold new study, Miniature Metropolis. Buttressed by uncommon erudition and far-reaching interpretive insight throughout, the book proposes a critical taxonomy of this highly compressed, elliptical, largely

Opinion about the English sense of humor can prove a handy means of cleaving any social gathering into two mutually uncomprehending factions—those that think it exists and those that don’t. Despite the debate’s rather low stakes (this isn’t surveillance versus security), it is a revealing one personality-wise, and if you’ve ever labored to convince someone that Monty Python’s fish-slapping dance is funny, you know the gap in sensibilities isn’t trivial. Glen Baxter’s drawings, which have been collected in over twenty books since the late ’70s, amply evidence his native clime’s tradition of nonsense and just plain silliness—from Lewis Carroll and

There is something about the Brontë sisters that is enduringly fascinating, something about their strange, gifted, and woefully abbreviated lives (none of them lived to forty) that reads like the stuff of myth. Perhaps it’s the combination of great personal privation and great artistic willfulness, the mixture of geographic isolation and literary renown, that lends their story an elemental note of warring forces both within and without. To think of these three motherless and conspicuously inbred young women—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—living off in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors together with an eccentric curate father and an alcoholic brother, in

I can’t remember the last time I used an electric typewriter. It most likely would have been in the course of typing out an address on an envelope—but then again, I can’t readily call to mind the last time I did that with anything other than that old-fashioned technology, the ballpoint pen, which itself is not really all that old school. The mass commercial distribution of the ballpoint pen in the United States dates only to about 1945, which means its triumphal appearance in the writing market occurred just under twenty years before that of the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter,

I have no secrets. —Robert Mapplethorpe By the time Robert Mapplethorpe died in March 1989 at the age of forty-two, he’d prepared for the preservation of his work and legacy. He’d established his foundation. He’d selected a biographer. He’d made what he knew would be his last self-portrait, gripping a cane topped with a death’s head. The attacks on his work began that June. Representative Dick Armey (R-TX) sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, signed by more than a hundred members of Congress, decrying NEA support for Mapplethorpe’s retrospective “The Perfect Moment,” then touring the country.

I always tell people that my favorite book is Reckless Disregard. That is Renata Adler’s account, published in 1986, of two high-profile libel trials that took place in New York City in the early ’80s. Those are Westmoreland v. CBS et al. and Sharon v. Time.