What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it

What is it about the promise of a frozen treat on a hot day that can make a five-year-old wake up in the pitch black of 5:00 am and pad to his mother’s bedside to poke her unceremoniously and ask: “Is it time to make the popsicles?” (No. No, it is not. Not before daylight, and certainly never before coffee.) It is, I suspect, more than just a craving for sugar and cooler temperatures. I’m almost certain, in fact, that it’s the same thing that compelled me to wear a shirt with a repeating pattern of ice-cream parlors on it

It’s not unusual for a biographer to grow unnervingly attached to her subject. But it is rare for one to appear impatient—and even somewhat disappointed—with what she unearths. Such is the case with The Convert, Deborah Baker’s portrait of Maryam Jameelah, a woman who rejected life in America to embrace Islam in Pakistan in the 1960s. Baker begins her book apparently hoping Jameelah’s unique story might shed light on the toxic, complex relationship between Islam and the West. The story of Jameelah—an articulate, educated woman who fled America to embrace Allah—would seem to vibrate with timely insights. But Baker comes

Jon Ronson is fascinated by people who are bonkers. And insane people who appear to be normal, and ostensibly sane people doing crazy things. The British journalist’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats — about a secret U.S. military wing that hoped to use mind power to walk through walls, become invisible and perform psychic executions — was the basis for the 2009 film of the same title.

The subtitle of William McGowan’s Gray Lady Down —What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means For America all but ensured its dismissal by book-review editors who aren’t drawn to anything quite so portentous, let alone pompous. According to the book’s website, McGowan tried to gin up a controversy over the fact that the Times didn’t review it, despite book-review editor Sam Tanenhaus’ supposed promise to him that it would. No controversy ensued, because Gray Lady also wasn’t reviewed in Times rival Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, or in the Washington Post, or in any other major

It’s hard to escape Sarah Palin. On Facebook and Twitter, cable news and reality television, she is a constant object of dispute, the target or instigator of some distressingly large proportion of the political discourse. If she runs for president—well, brace yourself! But there is one place where a kind of collective resolve has been able to push her aside, make her a less suffocating presence than almost everywhere else: Alaska.

In January 2010 The Baffler, the influential Chicago-based culture and politics journal cofounded by Thomas Frank in 1988, put out an impressive new issue, its first in three years. George Packer heralded the journal’s return in the New Yorker, writing that it was “a perfect moment for The Baffler’s kind of cultural criticism to be revived.” But the revival was lamentably brief. Despite the issue’s high quality and success—three Pushcart nominations, two book contracts born from pieces in the magazine—no follow-up emerged. By the fall of 2010, Frank was looking for a successor.

By yanking David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly (1986–87) from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek,” Smithsonian secretary G. Wayne Clough gifted to art history a splendid case study in cowardice, censorship, and institutional failure. Far from undermining the exhibition (which closed last February), moreover, Clough’s capitulation to the grumblings of the Catholic League managed to validate beyond all expectations the relevance of the show’s conceit. The Wojnarowicz Affair performed the very premise advanced by curators Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward: a story of queer portraiture told through a dialectical account of absence/presence, shame/pride, closeted/out, hidden/revealed.