Flipping through the imposing art book that accompanies the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, which explores punk rock’s influence on fashion, is like hearing your favorite Screamers song played in a mall. First, you feel bad—it’s more proof that everything gets sold out. Then you suspect that it’s some kind of dada trick. How else to explain sentences like this: “In punk’s spirit of revolution, Moda Operandi is the first online luxury retailer to offer unprecedented access to runway collections from the world’s top designers.” In punk’s spirit of revolution, my first instinct was to set the

Sanja Iveković, Make Up—Make Down, 1978, stills from a color video, 5 minutes 14 seconds. WHEN A RETROSPECTIVE as significant as Croatian artist Sanja Iveković’s “Sweet Violence” doesn’t travel at all, a comprehensive catalogue becomes all the more important. Fortunately, this eponymous summary of the show—which New York’s MoMA featured this past winter—delivers the crucial […]

Lee Friedlander, Tucson, 2011. ALTHOUGH SCULPTED FROM PLASTIC instead of marble, mass-produced, and typically equipped with both arms, store-window mannequins share an aesthetic as well as a sociological lineage with the Venus de Milo. Depictions of feminine beauty whose aspect and proportion proffer benchmark ideals have been around a long time—no doubt many Athenian women […]

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms.

Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th-century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. His widow, the Argentinian Chichita Calvino, has been careful to exclude all personal and love letters, as Calvino was jealous of his privacy. I must confess a personal interest. In 1983, as a callow 22-year-old, I wrote to Calvino requesting an interview in Rome. To my amazement, he agreed. In his flat near the Pantheon he leafed through the many pages of questions I presented. “Troppo, troppo, too many,” he said.

MICE LIVE IN OUR WALLS but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. Although we are pleased, we are also upset, because the mice behave as though there were something wrong with our kitchen. What makes this even more puzzling is that our house is much less tidy than the houses of our neighbors.

No one could have predicted on March 10, 2011, that the imminent Tōhoku earthquake, at magnitude 9.0, would be the greatest to hit Japan, or foreseen the giant tsunami that struck the Japanese coast minutes later. But that does not mean the subsequent meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was unavoidable. The plant was built to withstand a big earthquake and survive a moderately sized tsunami, but a panoply of engineering errors—too-short sea walls, backup diesel generators installed in locations likely to flood, pools overcrowded with spent fuel rods, and a main control room insufficiently

Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s father was assassinated, more by accident than design, by extreme right-wing Russian monarchists: they were attempting to kill another Russian émigré politician, Paul Milyukov. V.D. Nabokov bravely seized and disarmed one of the gunmen, and pinned him down, but was then shot three times by