During a 1969 Christmas show from Vietnam, Bob Hope failed, for once, to heed his own advice for entertaining troops. He got sentimental. He got preachy. At the time, Citizen Hope was a well-known flag-waving hawk. But Comedian Hope was something else. He had spent nearly forty years playing the coward’s coward, an icon of irresponsibility, showbiz egomania, and skirt-chasing self-absorption, preferring whenever possible to let his fellow Americans do his part for him. Now he told ten thousand GIs that he had just been to the White House—and added in dead earnest that President Nixon had assured him that

Elmgreen & Dragset are a Scandinavian artist duo known for making realistic environments in unlikely contexts. These projects—among their most famous is a fully realized Prada store in the desert outside Marfa, Texas—poke fun at the moneyed art world. In 33 Artists in 3 Acts, Sarah Thornton first encounters the pair at the opening of the Venice Biennale in 2009. They are presenting “The Collectors,” an exhibition for which they transformed two of the Biennale’s national pavilions into homes for a wealthy family and a gay bachelor, respectively. An actor playing a real-estate agent lets slip details of the personal

Nearly twenty years ago, Susan Sontag, in “The Decay of Cinema,” lamented, “No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theater.” But a decade before this dirge was written, Boyd McDonald, who had largely abandoned going out to the movies in 1969 (for reasons never explained), proved that some of the most ecstatic cinephilic—and carnal—delights could be found sitting alone at home. McDonald lustily, discursively wrote about the films that aired at all hours on television, which he viewed in his single-room apartment on the Upper West Side, often focusing on minor or supporting actors, as

“At times I’ve thought to myself maybe I have been mad since I was three just as my mother says, and someday if I recover my sanity the phantom tormenting me I call a certain party will disappear.” So says the hospital-bed-ridden narrator of Kenzaburo Oe’s 1972 novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. The amorphous label “a certain party,” ginned up by the narrator’s mother to describe his father—a troubling, enigmatic man, presumably dead—is intended to neutralize and debase him by not naming him. It turns him, in the eyes of the narrator, into “an imaginary

In a recent T: The New York Times Style Magazine story extolling the virtues of boxing films (classic and contemporary), Benjamin Nugent points out that every example of the genre involves a comeback, against all odds. The protagonist pulls off an upset victory in the ring and lives to fight another day.

When Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on two US military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July, killing four Marines and a Navy sailor, he was acting, at least in part, at the suggestion of a man who had been dead for four years. Among Abdulazeez’s possessions, investigators reportedly found various CDs of sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, a bookish, US-born al-Qaeda cleric who spread a vernacular, and thus deeply effective and reproducible, call for global jihad. Though Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, never committed an act of terrorism himself, his name has come up

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world’s greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his “true strength” is “undoubtedly in the essay. His collected essays written between 1962 and 1982, Contra viento y marea . . . makes the perfect pocket book for getting up to speed with how the bright baby-boom students of Latin America won their way towards a solid concept of liberal democracy.”

Teaching writers to record their life stories involves no small amount of hand-holding—and for good reason. Even after years of journaling or jotting down passing thoughts, the act of sharing your first-person stories with the world can feel like a kind of perversion, like sweating all over someone’s couch or coughing into the clam dip at a cocktail party. On the wrong day, even popular writers’ rallying cries—such as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones—feel like gorgeously embossed invitations to spread your germs far and wide.