Poor Mitt. He became the Republican candidate for president by default, as the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an uneasiness about dealing with others who might doubt his unerring rectitude. The only well-known anecdotes about his bland life of acquiring wealth are both cruel: leading a pack of

José Saramago’s work is often thought of as allegorical or subversively political. The Portuguese novelist, playwright, and poet had an instinct for stories that belittled political sentimentality, framing the grandiosity of dreams within the vulnerability of the dreamer. From Baltasar and Blimunda’s tragic lovers drowning in a swamp of political corruption to absurd militarization in response to a mysterious epidemic in Blindness, Saramago’s work reveals the parallel fragility of authority and idealism. The Lives of Things is a collection of six early short stories from the Nobel Prize winner, a poetic encapsulation of Saramago’s extraordinary talent as a skeptical inquirer

Bohemia, as we know, is the definitive post-industrial industry. It germinated locally in New York’s West Village in the 50s and 60s, was unleashed as a productive force by the rezoning of SoHo in the 70s, and then swept through the Village, Alphabet City and Williamsburg in the 80s and 90s. A global pattern, this steady advance of a middle-class avant-garde has transformed cities nationwide. Horrified by the rural and disaffected towards suburbia, these pilgrims’ capacity to capitalize on urban decay is what accounts for their relative freedom. More to the point, they love to write about it. Enter the

To most of the country, Detroit is characterized more by the people who left than by those who stayed. Detroiters like to joke that everyone returns eventually, but over the past fifty years, the city’s population has lost more than a million people, leaving it at a third of what it was at its peak at the end of the 1950s. Detroit is in a constant state of physical flux: At any point, that house on the corner might become a victim of the arson that is as ubiquitous in the city as Ford sedans and GM trucks. A local

Joe Sacco is Art Spiegelman with a passport, or Jon Lee Anderson with a sketchpad. Sacco’s “comics journalism”—intensively researched and reported stories told through text and illustrations—are deeply humane, disturbing portraits of war, oppression, and sectarian tension. Since turning his attention abroad in the late ’80s, Sacco has produced articles and books about the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere that rival the reporting of most top-flight foreign correspondents. His work, moreover, is a reminder of the hidebound nature of much international reporting, and of the potential for creative disruption in the field. If there were any justice in American

In the late nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur’s laboratory assistants made sure to always have a loaded gun on hand. Their boss, who was already famous for his revolutionary work on food safety, had turned his attention to rabies. Since the infectious agent—later identified as a virus—was too small to be isolated at the time, the only way to study the disease was to keep a steady of supply of infected animals in the basement of the Parisian lab. As part of their research, Pasteur and his assistants routinely pinned down rabid dogs and collected vials of their foamy saliva. The

The opening scene of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is one of the most famously difficult to get through in literature. That’s not because of its style, which is sublime, but because it describes the experience of falling asleep. Many susceptible readers nod off the first few times they attempt it. All writing about sleep has this problem; of the fundamental human appetites, it’s the least exciting. The better you invoke it, the more likely you are to incite it, and because it can’t be remembered, sleep can’t be described.