Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames

The problem for feminist artists of the past few decades isn’t that their work is absent from museums. It’s that their art isn’t usually where one hopes or expects to find it: in the main galleries of major institutions. However, archives, libraries, and artists’ files richly document art by women—a by-product of these artists’ marginalization from the halls of Great Art, which caused many feminist artists to adopt ephemeral, mass-distributed forms. As testimony to this process, the Martha Wilson Sourcebook, a collection of texts selected by Wilson and reproduced from her archives,

For much of the past century or so, Mexico has existed out of context.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran the country for seven decades, enforced a powerful state of critical amnesia. Newspapers reported news with no background to the story at all. The lives of the powerful weren’t discussed, unless they fell from official favor.

Lately, however, that’s all been changing. Critical biographies of the country’s leaders are published, and read, in a way that was unthinkable as recently as the mid-1990s. Newspaper columnists—Raymundo Riva Palacio, Sergio Sarmiento, Luis

Like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis has made his career reporting on outliers. Lewis has delivered bracing accounts of investment bankers whose doomsday predictions went ignored until they came to pass, of teenagers who harnessed the power of Internet message boards to undermine the stock market, and of low-budget baseball teams that used unorthodox statistics to compete with richer clubs.

Also like Gladwell, Lewis is a fast read: His explanations of thorny financial processes are surprisingly compelling, his characters entertaining, and even when we know things aren’t going to

With early Tuesday’s abrupt evacuation of Zuccotti Park, the City of New York has managed—for the moment—to dislodge protesters from Wall Street. But it will be much harder to turn attention away from the financial excesses of the very rich—the problems that have given Occupy Wall Street such traction. Data on who is in the top 1 percent of earners further reinforces their point. Here’s why.