Midway through Keith Richards’s largely genial Life, he uncorks a sudden barrage of invective against the film director Donald Cammell: “He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women. . . . Putting people down was almost an addiction for him.” Only the narcs and his frenemy Mick Jagger (mocked for his now infamous “tiny todger”) come in for comparable slagging off. Why Richards should harbor such animus against this relatively obscure figure will puzzle anyone unfamiliar with the seedier precincts of late-1960s cinema, specifically the sexed-up, drugged-out

Max Weber in America? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom. How could one have any influence on the other?

The ability to comprehend unspeakable violence is based largely on scale. Today it’s frighteningly easy to imagine a situation where you might be killed by someone. But for most of human history, it was more difficult to conjure the deaths of thousands of people. Technology makes it possible to the point that we can watch, into perpetuity, as portions of humanity are wiped away by natural disasters or by terrorists in hijacked airplanes. Why do we bother to watch at all? Is it a skewed attempt at empathy?

Suicide by Edouard Levé tells two intertwined stories. In one, a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man’s life. In the other, a young author has killed himself, but not before writing a novel in which a young man has killed himself and a friend meditates on the dead man’s life. Part of what makes the experience of reading Suicide so singular is that the young author in question is Edouard Levé himself: Ten days after handing in his manuscript, Levé hanged himself, at age forty-two. It is all but impossible when reading, then,

Janet Malcolm is to malice what Wordsworth was to daffodils. In nine previous books, she’s so thoroughly, so indelibly investigated a certain breed of malice—the kind that festers in the writer-subject relationship—that it ought to bear her name. Malice is journalism’s “animating impulse,” she writes as she turns reportage inside out to show us its seams (and seaminess) with trenchant ceremony. Biography and journalism are rotten with exploitation, venom, voyeurism; we’ve just averted our eyes. Like the child who cries that the emperor has no clothes, she announces truths hidden in plain sight. Of course the journalist will pretend to

In the past decade, a handful of writers have added compelling twists to the classic immigration novel, adding new and unexpected layers to tales of newcomers in new lands. Jeffrey Eugenides, for example, wrote about a hermaphrodite immigrant in Middlesex; in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the protagonist had a fantastic imagination and used an unexpected language infused with Spanish and video game slang. Now comes David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, an immigration novel in which the characters don’t actually immigrate.

“The train climbed the steel trestle high over the forest of red and brown buildings that tumbled across the landscape,” wrote Harrison Salisbury in his 1958 account of life among Brooklyn’s fighting teen gangs, The Shook-Up Generation. “From the platform . . . I looked down in the tenement back yards, the rubbish piles and bright paper tatters brightened by wash lines of blue and pink, purple and yellow. Here and there I saw the scraggly green of Brooklyn back-yard trees dwarfed by soot and sickened by cinders.”

Ancient egypt has been misunderstood since Herodotus put pen to papyrus in the fifth century B.C., though its appeal has never flagged. Exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts still draw large crowds at museums, and the “documentaries” on cable channels continue to flood in. But much of this attention feeds into an idea that Egypt is “other” and “exotic”—a changeless, mysterious world of tombs, temples and sorcerers. Hollywood is guilty of promoting this image, but so are scholars, who are prone to emphasize mummies and royal tombs to the exclusion of topics such as agricultural production, social organization and, broader still, economic