Every day we should be improving. Our productivity and happiness should be on the rise. We should be making more friends. Our spouses should love us more and our children should be happier and increasingly confident about their positions in the world. And if we are not improving, inching closer and closer to our best lives, then we are failing ourselves and everyone around us.

The burden of this pervasive cultural lie, that life should be a relentless victory march, asserts itself on every page of Maria Semple's new novel, Today Will Be Different (Little, Brown, $27). Like Bernadette Fox, the

Agnostics and atheists rejoice! If the holiday season brings out in you, as it occasionally does in me, a nagging undercurrent of regret that there is no higher order giving weight to your festivities, Taschen books understands. Its reissue of Salvador Dalí's 1973 cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala ($60), filled with lavish recipes and images that frequently verge on the disturbing, is not, as the introduction teases rhetorically, "just another cook book presented to an already saturated market." Oh, no. It presents nothing less than a new way to live now: Dalínian Gastro Esthetics. Or should I say,

Even among the crew of language-besotted artists—Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman—the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat stands out as especially devoted to words as subject matter. Indeed, enigmatic poems rather than images constituted his earliest forays as a graffiti artist (in a duo with the nom de plume SAMO©). But the move to canvas hardly diminished his affection for painted words, numbers, sentences, and names. In WORDS ARE ALL WE HAVE: PAINTINGS BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (Hatje Cantz, $60), several critics survey the artist's language-based art, and

When I was seventeen, I had my long hair cut off in an attempt to emulate Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Alas, it turned out that the Cleopatran effect—a look the young Streisand seemingly cultivated through a combination of thick makeup and pure willpower—wasn't so easy to re-create. I took the precaution of not telling anyone why I'd done it, but even if somebody had wanted to make a joke, Streisand had already beaten them to it. A woman goes to her hairdresser and asks for the "Barbra" look, she used to say. So he takes the hairbrush and breaks her nose.

One great Streisandian mystery is

I know three people microdosing LSD or mushrooms: a very young, pearly-cheeked web editor from California; a wealthy, jarringly enthusiastic computer programmer I met at a warehouse party; and a catalogue model with a demure husband. Like everyone, they appear happier and more productive than me. They work in midtown. They live in better neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Their existence does not, however, propel me to alter my consciousness, much as a low-level aversion to scientific nonfiction from independent publishers will forever keep me from reading the book that "popularized" microdosing: The

On a recent Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants' dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain's leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. "Hi David," it began. "This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria." Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach.

The vote for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the "biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history," delivered by the white working class to spite "the establishment." But it isn't just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it's also who delivers it.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now.