As a practicing architect and a leading critic, Michael Sorkin is a unique voice in the debate over how to construct and sustain the city. His dual vocation allows him to bring a special urgency—and no small measure of poignancy—to the persistent question of how our cities can retain their meaning in the frenetically globalizing marketplace. “Urbanism is in crisis,” he writes, “the condition for billions of people in our cities is wretched, and we need to rapidly refit our dysfunctional metropolises for justice and sustainability.” To meet the urgent challenges of planning the postmodern city on a humane scale,

MOBY-DICK IS ONE OF THOSE WORKS of literature more honored than fully read. Many a bold reader has sailed into its opening pages only to leap overboard in the midst of some lengthy, minutiae-rich account of the whaling business. Melville’s action-adventure scenes, harpooning rather than sperm milking, have certainly inspired visual artists—from the Rockwell Kent […]

In the Poetics, Aristotle divides history from poetry: History relates what has happened, whereas poetry tells what may happen. It is the friction between these two spheres—the actual, so-called real world, versus the world of possibles, a parallel universe, the realm of dream, of imagination and of perception, that double-world where our other selves are constantly splitting off from us through the choices and chances we never took—that powers Brenda Shaughnessy’s magnificent, monumental new book of poems.

Tereska Torrès will be probably be remembered as the world’s first lesbian pulp novelist, though as Torrès was always the first to point out, she had no intention of earning that reputation. Born in Paris in 1920, Torrès served with the Free French forces in London during the Second World War and fictionalized her experience in the 1950 novel Women’s Barracks. Though she went on to write fourteen more books before her death last week, Women’s Barracks became a cult classic for its campy homoeroticism and since its publication has sold over 4 million copies in the US alone. (“If

Ever since The Iliad and The Odyssey were ascribed to Homer, the blind poet has served as a metaphor for the ability to catch sight of things beyond mere appearance. Robert Duncan, born in 1919, belonged to this tribe of seers. At the age of 3, he slipped in the snow in Yosemite while wearing sunglasses against the glare; they shattered, and the injury resulted in strabismus—a condition in which the eyes cannot focus on the same object.

‘There is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss,’ Lisa Cohen observes in All We Know, and, contrariwise, ‘a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.’ Why do we see what we see? Why do we fail to see what others see? Can we see things before they are ready to be seen? Can we see things before we are ready to see them? Such questions lie at the heart of Cohen’s strikingly elegant and assured biographical study of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the

On the plane, something odd but also vaguely magical-seeming happened: namely, nobody knew what time it was. Right before we landed, the flight attendant made an announcement, in English and Spanish, that although daylight saving time recently went into effect in the States, the island didn’t observe that custom. As a result, we had caught up — our time had passed into sync with Cuban time. You will not need to change your watches. Then, moments later, she came on again and apologized. She had been wrong, she said.