In “Chat écoutant la musique” (“Cat Listening to Music”), a two-minute, fifty-five-second video posted to YouTube on December 21, 2010, a black, white, and gray tabby sprawls across the keyboard of a Yamaha DX7. He sleeps and stirs, seeming to enjoy the pellucid, lapping notes and chords of a piece of piano music playing in the room. We watch the cat’s paws depress the keys soundlessly when he arches and stretches. We notice his ears perk and twitch. When the music briefly intensifies, he raises his head and glares fiercely into the middle distance; then, as the tune eases off

In the best chapter in Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks describes his own history of experimentation with drugs during his thirties, when he was a neurology resident in Southern California on a quest to satisfy an obsessive curiosity about the neurochemical background of dreams and hallucinations. A day on Artane, a synthetic drug allied to belladonna that in large doses can induce delirium, featured a visit from his friends Jim and Kathy. Sacks cooked ham and eggs, chatting with them as he stood in the kitchen and they sat in the living room, then put breakfast on a tray and carried it

“You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this.” Slate writer Amanda Hess received this tweet from the charmingly named user “headlessfemalepig.” She wrote about the experience—and, more generally, about the hazards of being a woman online—for Pacific Standard in early 2014. In that article, for which she later won a National Magazine Award, she details some of the exhausting consequences of online harassment: “Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services,

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world’s richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch’s Maldoror. I am not writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I

“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks, published

Georges Perec once published an essay called “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” which confronts the “problem of a library”: how to classify one’s books when they so frequently defy categorization? What is a reliable way to arrange them so that you can lay your hand on the right one when you need it? Perec distinguishes between stable classifications and provisional ones, those that, “in principle, you continue to respect,” and those “supposed to last only a few days, the time it takes for a book to discover, or rediscover, its definitive place.” As a

A single word may send a reader—or viewer—down the wrong path. On the cover of ALIBIS: SIGMAR POLKE 1963–2010 (Museum of Modern Art, $75), the title appears against a close-up of snakeskin—printed on boards embossed with a scaly texture—framing a photo of the artist as a child manipulating a marionette. In the book’s lead essay, curator Kathy Halbreich proposes that Polke studiously avoided any signature style or medium, “so that his aesthetic method . . . enacted the role of an alibi.” But alibis brings to mind excuses, and the book takes a historically constrained viewpoint—the text is full of