Ugliness was fun for a while, but then it got too real. After kitsch—which bottomed, or perhaps topped, out in the middle of the last century—came a dark commercial anti-kitsch, an ugly so enveloping and horrid that it couldn’t be celebrated. Mass culture and aspirational brand culture drove right into each other, merging into a hideous beast that vomits Target “designer” lines and QVC frocks and polyester “fleece” blankets in sunny colors. There’s nothing charming about the ugliness that governs how we buy what we live with now. All that’s worse is the production regime under which it’s all

Since the age of thirteen or so, my female cohorts and I have defined womanhood through a handy set of quantifiable—or tangible, at least—measures: bra size, dark eyeliner, use of tampons, relative intactness of one’s hymen, smoking, being “eaten out.” From there, the relevant metrics have only accumulated: a double-digit number of sexual partners, being able to fuck like a man, a long-term boyfriend, securing a respectable profession, refusing to go dutch on dates, being able to fuck like a lady, paying rent, and so on. But now, at the precipice of thirty, I’ve found that the single experience

"In my doctor's office I hold up a worksheet and ask him how many I have to fill out before I feel better," the author and artist Leanne Shapton writes in her 2012 memoir, Swimming Studies, recalling a visit to her therapist. A former competitive swimmer who twice made Olympic trials, Shapton feels adrift after quitting the sport—no longer the athlete she was and not yet the artist she will soon become. Her therapist tells her: a hundred. "I get it, like laps," Shapton writes. "I settle in, blinker myself, count the laps. Six months and a hundred and fifty worksheets later I feel better."

An obsessed auteur, denied major-studio financing for his audaciously personal project, follows his own path to glory. Declaring himself writer, producer, director, and star, he makes the picture on his terms—ruling his set with an iron fist, shouting down naysayers, and, in his darkest hours, clinging to the belief that he is changing the face of the art form.

Am I speaking of Orson Welles? Jean Renoir? John Cassavetes? Or am I speaking, finally, of Tommy Wiseau?

If that last name doesn’t ring a bell, you still might know Wiseau’s chef d’oeuvre, a 2003 drama titled The Room. If even that

John Horne Burns was the author of The Gallery, published in 1947. At the time, the book was considered a great war novel (less remarked was that it’s also a great gay novel). The book’s publication was widely viewed as the arrival of a huge literary talent and established tremendous expectations for the young writer. What followed, though, was failure on a tremendous scale. On the face of it, David Margolick’s biography of the author, Dreadful (which was Burns’s code word for “homosexual”), is a straightforward chronicle of the man’s rise and fall.

Margolick, a contributor to Vanity Fair and

Portrait photographs invite speculation, much as diplomatic treaties do when made public. In both cases, the product is the result of undisclosed, expected give-and-take between engaged parties. Their interests were adulterated in a process where agents jockeyed for an advantage, one side maybe losing, the other gaining some edge over the other. In portraiture, negotiations affect those who pose and those who make the picture, quite aside from those who compete by making similar pictures. Deliberate portraits are power outcomes, not always as involving when they appear harmonious as when they