When looking for Chinese reactions to the anti-Japanese riots that took place in late September, it was probably not much of a surprise that the Western press turned to Han Han, the widely read Shanghai-based blogger. In characteristic form, Han gave a riff on the protests that obliquely criticized the government, while at the same time insulated himself from making a direct accusation: “As far as looting and destroying things, this must be punished by law, or else I might suspect that there was some official backing behind all this.”

For Virginia Woolf, the sounds of the streets of London formed a language of their own: “I stop in London sometimes, and hear feet shuffling. That’s the language, I think, that’s the phrase I should like to catch,” she wrote in an early draft of The Waves. Many poets who have written of London share this opinion, and a new anthology—London in Verse, edited by Mark Ford—reflects six-hundred years of the rich and heady language that they have chosen to describe their city: its rhythm, its pace, its stench; its people, their stench.

Three of Coralie Bickford-Smith’s cover designs for the Penguin Great Food series. After spending some weeks luxuriating in the gorgeous presence of Penguin’s Great Food series—a collection of reprints that includes the genre’s classic titles from the past four hundred years—I have many questions. Would I ever actually make lambs’ ears with sorrel or fricassee […]

In the first chapter of his exposé on the utter decrepitude of East London, The People of the Abyss (1903), Jack London seeks out those “trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the world,” in other words, the Cook’s travel agents, known for sending curious and adventurous Britons to “Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet,” for advice on how to navigate, indeed how to find, the East End of London. ‘You can’t do it, you know,’ said the human emporium of routes and fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch. ‘It is so—ahem—so unusual.” Indeed.

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,

Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1604. Toward the end of his life, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) entered a Sicilian church and was offered holy water. Caravaggio asked what good the blessing would do, and was told it would cancel his venial sins. “Then it is no use,” he replied, “because mine are all […]

Books about corporations tend to stick to a few tried-and-true formulas. Many read like sports stories: Companies win with visionary leadership and by being smarter and showing more gumption than their competitors. Some of these accounts are anthropological treatments—thick descriptions of what it’s like to work within the unique culture of a firm. Then there are the angry tirades about the damage companies do.

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT THINK Ken Johnson was hallucinating when he wrote Are You Experienced? But the New York Times art critic’s first book is not a stoner’s kiss-the-sky meditation on visual culture so much as a disarming, sometimes overreaching, memoir of the ways contemporary artists have expanded his own mind. Does boring art look better […]

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.