Thomas Mallon’s Yours Ever: People and Their Letters is not the history of letter writing its subtitle seems to promise. Instead, it is an amiable, very readable collection of brief essays about dozens of correspondents, almost all of whom were not just “people” but professional writers. Mark Twain and Colette, Bruno Schulz and Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs and H. L. Mencken: These are not individuals you would want at the same dinner party, but they would all grudgingly admit to belonging to the same guild. Even most of the statesmen Mallon discusses—Lincoln, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt,

One of my high school summer jobs involved washing test tubes and pretending to be an apprentice research assistant in a biochemistry lab at a hospital in Manhattan. My coworkers, the actual researchers, had followed their boss, the senior scientist, from a midwestern university. All women, all blond, they seemed to share some arcane knowledge beyond the scientific and to be bound by some common thread beyond their professional and collegial connection.

One outward manifestation of this mysterious bond was that each wore a heavy ring engraved with a dollar sign. They patiently explained to me

On October 1 in Beijing, teams of weather-modification specialists stood at the ready as advanced military hardware, elaborately decorated floats, and ranks of gun-toting women in silvery boots paraded down Chang’an Avenue to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It was another immense spectacle at the dawn of a predicted Chinese century, following the 2008 Beijing Olympics and in advance of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

The scene was described and criticized in the American press as a celebration of six decades of Communist rule—sixty years of dictatorship by

Every art has its day, and so maybe does every city and every neighborhood. Lower Manhattan—Greenwich Village, SoHo, the East Village, and the Lower East Side—saw an explosion of poetry and painting, music and dance, over much of the past century. But from the early ’60s to the ’90s, the performing arts flourished. They flourished in myriad genres, music especially, and devotees of one aspect of the scene—whether conceptual performance art, minimalist composition, experimental dance and theater, punk rock, or disco—were sometimes only dimly aware of the others. Yet everyone who was there knew