The city hall of Siena, Italy, features a series of frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. One, titled Allegory of Good Government, represents the virtues thought to promote a healthy civic order, while another, an allegory of bad government, castigates vices such as avarice, pride, and vainglory, which were held to contribute to the misery of the populace. Luc Sante’s The Other Paris aims to stand this representation of the city on its head. For Sante, the civic order that Lorenzetti praised is an artificial construct imposed on the “wild” city by “the exigencies of money and the proclivities of

Technology is more than gears and sprockets, transistors and microchips; it also functions as a vision of the future, one that provides the physical means of translating that vision into reality. And because implicit in every technological innovation is a program for improving society, technological change has often inspired Americans to engage in prophecy. Utopians place their faith in the unfolding of technological progress, insisting that it will liberate humanity from drudgery and poverty, make information freely accessible to all, and, one day, usher in the era of Ray Kurzweil’s great,

When he was eighteen, southern singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt was in a car accident that partially paralyzed him from the neck down. He had been drinking and flipped his car into a ditch; no one else was hurt. Chesnutt would never walk again, but about a year after the crash he regained limited use of his arms and hands—just enough to play a few simple chords on the guitar. “My fingers don’t move too good at all,” he told Terry Gross in a 2009 NPR interview. “I realized that all I could play were . . . G, F, C—those kinds of chords. And so . . . that’s what I was going to do.” Working within

The life of Haydée Santamaría was divided between a few days of heroism and decades of bureaucratic toil. A new biography by the poet and activist Margaret Randall, who knew and loved her, tells stories of courage and sacrifice that sometimes make her sound too amazing to be true. She was one of two women (with Melba Hernández) who took part in the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks that launched the Cuban Revolution, and from the guerrillas’ victory in 1959 until her death in 1980, she was the force behind the culture and arts institution Casa de las Américas. According to Randall, the Casa,

“I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye,” an unnamed female narrator states at the outset of Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born. The spot, she describes, “stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.” And so, “in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract.”

Thus begins a remarkable exploration into sight and the perceptions of childhood. Nettel, a talented Mexican

“Already,” Jonathan Littell writes, “all this is turning into a story.” So ends Littell’s compilation of notebooks from his time in Homs, in western Syria, reporting for Le Monde on a “brief moment” (January 16 to February 2, 2012) in the ongoing uprising against the Assad regime. Almost immediately after his departure, he notes in an epilogue, many of the activists, opposition forces, and neighborhoods he documents here were “crushed in a bloodbath that, as I write these lines, is still going on.” The phrase “as I write these lines” first appeared in the French edition of the notebooks,