A few months ago The Washington Post reported that Facebook collects ninety-eight data points on each of its nearly two billion users. Among this ninety-eight are ethnicity, income, net worth, home value, if you are a mom, if you are a soccer mom, if you are married, the number of lines of credit you have, if you are interested in Ramadan, when you bought your car, and on and on and on.

How and where does Facebook acquire these bits and pieces of one’s personal life and identity? First, from information users volunteer, like relationship status, age, and university affiliation. They also come

Christopher Lyon: First I'd like to say something about the book we're here to discuss. This 828-page tome on the art and life of Louise Bourgeois, who was born in 1911 and died in 2010, is the product of some thirty years of work on Robert Storr's part. It comprehensively surveys Bourgeois's career as an artist, which spanned nearly seventy-five years, with more than nine hundred illustrations. Chapters relating Bourgeois's life and analyzing her creative achievement alternate with portfolios, in chronological sequence, that show the unfolding of her oeuvre. The final chapter is a coda that

Last May, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the second most powerful leader in the Islamic State, hinted that the caliphate was crumbling. "Whoever thinks that we fight to protect some land or some authority, or that victory is measured thereby, has strayed far from the truth," he said, in a long audio message that was released to fellow-jihadis. He also suggested a shift in strategy. "It is the same—whether Allah blesses us with consolidation or we move into the bare, open desert, displaced and pursued."

Adnani, a thirty-nine-year-old Syrian, ran the organization's propaganda shop and a secret

At the end of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when the two hapless title characters, aboard their fatal voyage, open the letter that sentences them to death, Guildenstern says: "Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? . . . To be told so little—to such an end—and still, finally, to be denied an explanation—" He doesn't finish the sentence, of course; "to be denied an explanation" is simply his life's condition. In fictional narratives, and in the narratives we piece together uneasily out of history, some lives always seem like that: shapeless, except