Sticky Fingers raises an overdue question: Is the era of devoting epic tomes to the exploits of mercurial pricks officially over? If so, Joe Hagan’s skilled filleting of Jann Wenner’s history as the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine is one hell of a coffin nail.

The book was born over lunch at an upstate New York eatery. Wenner, in his egotism, offered Hagan, then a journalist at New York magazine, unfettered access and deep cooperation (he asked to review only details of his sex life, which are nonetheless abundant), without requiring final approval, so sure was he that Hagan’s excavation

Six years ago, a soap opera set off an angry debate among historians, politicians, and viewers in Turkey. It was called Muhtes¸em Yüzyil (The Magnificent Century) and depicted the inner workings and often-violent intrigues of the sixteenth-century Ottoman palace—particularly the fraught relationships between Sultan Süleyman and his harem, viziers, and eunuchs. The show was wildly popular, but politicians from the AKP, the party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, protested the portrayal of the holy sultan as a lush and a womanizer. They claimed it was clearly inaccurate, as if they were unaware of the

Artists who make books are as varied as artists who make anything else, and they offer just as many reasons for their fixation. For some it’s a documentary form, one that both toys with history and creates it, as in Christian Boltanski’s Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944–1950 (Research and Presentation of All That Remains of My Childhood, 1944–1950), a 1969 précis of his childhood that mixes real mementos with found materials. For Sophie Calle, Stanley Brouwn, and others, books begin as interior spaces—diaries or sketchbooks for jotting notes and thought

I’d long had it in the back of my mind to write something about Clancy Sigal, which according to my notes I’d provisionally titled “The Man Who Fascinated Women (Writers).” Whatever it is in me that’s drawn to wounded men—and Clancy was a great one of the species—I suspect the fact that Doris Lessing got to this one first, branding him as her property, was no small part of the allure. Clancy and I spoke once on the phone, mostly about his thing with Lessing, but I never followed through. I guess he gave up waiting, since he went ahead and died in July, at age ninety. I don’t think he’d mind

“This is the Seinfeld cookbook,” Mike Solomonov explained to me earlyish one morning not too long ago. “It’s about nothing.” We were standing in the original Federal Donuts shop, which he and four partners opened in the low-slung, residential, and decidedly uncool Pennsport neighborhood of South Philadelphia in 2011. Sunlight streamed in through a plate-glass window emblazoned with the company’s red rooster logo, and the smells of sugar and coffee and hot fat were in the air. Steven Cook, one of Solomonov’s partners and a cofounder of CookNSolo Restaurant Partners, the pair’s mini empire of

There was a time, not too long ago, when we saw college education as both an individual attainment and a societal good: We talked in lofty terms about “citizenship” and “democracy.” Not anymore. “A college education,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in her new book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, “whether it is a night class in auto mechanics or a graduate degree in physics, has become an individual good.” Today, everything rests on the individual’s shoulders and education is solely a personal investment. It is worth the struggle, debt, and sacrifice