I’m just guessing, but I bet one of the most irritating things about being an expert on climate change is people asking you where they should hunker down to weather the coming crisis. Where’s a good place to buy property given the current forecast? Somewhere that’s not too close to the coast, away from rising sea levels and tropical storms. A place that has fresh water and other natural resources in abundance, of course. And, better yet, somewhere that will get more pleasant as the thermometer cranks. New York City is looking iffy these days. Phoenix is out. Montreal perhaps?

Lewis is often referred to as a business writer, and this is sort of true, in that his narratives usually focus on some kind of market, be it for bonds or baseball players. But he’s a business writer only in the same way that Malcolm Gladwell is a business writer. What most interests him are people and how they behave. He tends to favor stories about mavericks—like the Tuohys, Beane, Whitney, and Steve Eisman, the eccentric short-seller star of The Big Short—smart people who identify gaps of logic and market inefficiencies, and take advantage of them.

A friend of mine recently came to me with the breathless news that he had just slept with a famous porn star. The performer had contacted him out of the blue on an online hook-up site. (My friend was supposed to be spending his day looking for jobs. Frailty, thy name is Manhunt.net). Excited and a little jealous, I asked the obvious question.

When Geoff Dyer wrote the The Missing of the Somme in the early ’90s, he had published two novels, The Colour of Memory (1989) and The Search (1993), an acclaimed but highly unusual book about jazz, But Beautiful (1991), and a critical study of John Berger. Of those titles, the Berger book now stands out as being the least Dyer-ish (the author himself dismisses it as boring and academic). Yet the very qualities we now consider trademark Dyer—the discursive, off-kilter insights into art, photography, and the ways we organize our knowledge—are qualities partly gleaned from Berger. In no book is

The idea of the library as theatrical set, where the content of books is secondary to the atmosphere books create, may gain more respect in coming years. This past May marked the centennial of the New York Public Library’s main branch building. The library is celebrating with a yearlong series of programs and exhibitions focusing on the library’s past as well as its next hundred years. These celebrations, launched with a “Find the Future” festival weekend in May, promote the idea of the library as a stage: an environment where things can happen and people can meet, and one that

There was a time when all good schoolboys knew Latin, and even debutantes spoke French. Today, we who claim English as our mother tongue feel less pressed to learn a foreign language. Why bother, when the rest of the world is so keen to master ours? And yet the idea of translation continues to excite strong passions. If I mention that I dabble in this dark art, I am accused of taking liberties and betraying the author’s intentions. I am instructed either to serve the text invisibly or to accept that some things just can’t be translated, and give up.

Among the many sources of humiliation I either learned about or was forced to relive while reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador, $14): having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself or virtually any other physical process, writing or being written about, being jealous, being cheated on, being Googled, being mistaken for the wrong gender, being Michael Jackson, electroshock therapy, impotence, hair loss, inadvertent erections in awkward circumstances, smelling like liverwurst, vomiting onstage before a musical performance, voyeuristic curiosity about death, failing to visit a dying colleague in the hospital, and being photographed after you’re dead. The list,

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.

For her sixtieth birthday, Jane Fonda decided she wanted to make a short video about her life to “discover its themes.” When she asked her daughter, documentarian Vanessa Vadim, to help her, Vanessa said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?”