In September of last year, two months before the presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Tonight Show. In what felt like one of the grossest media moments of our recent era—and let’s face it, the competition is stiff—host Jimmy Fallon asked his guest whether it would be OK to do something “not presidential” with him. “Can I mess your hair up?” Fallon proposed, puppyish and wide-eyed. Trump, pantomiming good-natured reluctance, let the host reach over and muss his thin, gingery strands, setting that precarious hair soufflé askew and earning a big hand from the

Protein powder stirred into diet orange soda. Milk pudding with a touch of voodoo mixed in. Thick hunks of gingerbread, boiled bacon with broad beans, “Shrimp Wiggle,” and oceans of champagne. These are just some examples of the food and drink that pop up in Laura Shapiro’s new book, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Viking, $27). As you might guess, the collection of women responsible for this cornucopia is, to put it mildly, eclectic. This volume is bookended by Dorothy Wordsworth (William’s sister—he was the gingerbread fan) and Helen Gurley Brown, of

In 2009, after his show “Sade for Sade’s Sake,” Paul Chan took a hiatus from making art. He used his time away to found Badlands Unlimited, a press that has since published Saddam Hussein’s On Democracy, Calvin Tomkins’s interviews with Duchamp, dozens of artist e-books, a “digital group show” called “How to Download a Boyfriend,” and one engraved sandstone. In 2015, Badlands started putting out erotica under the imprint New Lovers. “Art is what I do now to pass the time while editing erotic fiction,” Chan told the Paris Review. He says he was inspired to launch New Lovers by Olympia Press,

They saw dead people. They heard them too. When summoned, dead people rang bells, wrote on slates, levitated tables. Sometimes their faces hovered in the air. The dead made this commotion for their parents, children, siblings, and friends at the behest of gifted individuals capable of readily communing with the world beyond. If the movement associated with this phenomenon, known as spiritualism—which was popular to varying degrees from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century—now appears a quaint relic of a benighted past, we should consider the vigorous currency of aura reading,

THE VIVID DESCRIPTIONS of human suffering in Dante’s Inferno have long attracted visual artists. It’s no surprise that Sandro Botticelli, Gustave Doré, William Blake, Auguste Rodin, and Salvador Dalí all tried their hand at depicting the Italian poet’s demonic landscape. That dark world is rich in dramatic occasion (“an old man, his hair white with age, cried out: / ‘Woe unto you, you wicked souls’”) and irresistibly pictorial (“These wretches . . . / naked and beset / by stinging flies and wasps / that made their faces stream with blood, / which, mingled with their tears, / was gathered at