“To be Prada is to be perfect in every way,” reads one of the few examples of actual prose in Prada (Abrams, $125), the luxury-goods company’s latest and largest coffee-table book. It’s an image-heavy tome about image, and words are relegated to captions. The form makes clear what no corporate-authorized text could be expected to state outright: Prada, no differently from any other global brand, traffics in image.

Few companies seem as riven with contradictions as Prada. While its products are called “luxury,” it remains best known for a line of leather-trimmed black nylon handbags that were

“Which wife are you?” The audacity of this question, often posed to Norris Church Mailer, sixth wife of Norman Mailer, reflects the particular challenges of marrying a larger-than-life literary icon with a checkered reputation. Consider for a moment the skill set required to be Mailer’s wife: an ability to play second fiddle to an outsize ego (Mailer’s pugnacious self-infatuation was legendary), a willingness to overlook the past (Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele, with a penknife at a party) without also neglecting its spoils (Mailer already had seven children), the capacity to support a

Absolute quiet isn’t a problem for most of us. Rather, it’s the barrage of modern life that makes it so we cannot abide long silences when they happen to come our way. We arrive home and switch on the television, even if no one watches, especially if we’re alone. We turn up our iPods to at least control our sonic environment. We lull children to sleep with white-noise machines—devices that, it turns out, make the young liable to distraction and slowed language processing.

Why does silence obsess us, and why is it so difficult to find? In a world of sounds on top of sounds—engine roars, traffic

“Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters,” quipped Clement Greenberg, the legendary critic of modernism, to Rosalind Krauss, his most brilliant disciple. It was 1974: Krauss had made a name for herself writing on Minimalism in the pages of Artforum but would soon leave the magazine to cofound October. As promised by the journal’s name, a revolution in art history was afoot.

All of which is as familiar to students of contemporary art as the legacy of Richard Serra—one of many artists whose reputations are bound to Krauss’s pioneering analyses. Her key essays remain mainstays of

“How did people sit in the Middle Ages?” It is a remarkable question—disarmingly simple yet potentially sweeping. A precocious child might pose something of the sort to a flustered parent—and the child minder in question would absently wave off the inquiry or simply ignore it.

That’s largely been the posture of professional historians when it comes to vernacular kinds of interior design. On the surface, of course, it’s easy enough to intuit—through pictorial and material evidence—how medieval Europeans sat. But it’s much harder to discern why people sat the way they did, and what, if anything,

Upon accepting the Georg-Büchner-Prize for German literature in 1960, the poet Paul Celan gave a speech titled “The Meridian.” Celan was not given to clarity in his verse, and “The Meridian” is no different. It is, however, the best account we have of what Celan was up to in his art. An essay about the speech sits at the center of Raymond Geuss’s terrific collection Politics and the Imagination and might well hint at what Geuss, professor of philosophy at Cambridge, is himself up to.

Celan says that in his poetry he attempts “to speak, to orient myself, to project for myself reality.” This he

Before September 11, 2001, the doctrine of habeas corpus—the principle that the state must explain why it’s hauled you off in leg shackles—was rarely the subject of legal dispute. Habeas cases were filed, and the writ was either granted or denied. But the claim that judges couldn’t hear such cases—that the government might detain great masses of people for years on end and without justification—wasn’t really open to debate. Habeas corpus is, after all, the only common-law doctrine enshrined in the Constitution. But after 9/11, the Bush administration began to round up foreigners, classify them