Richard Misrach’s camera follows hard upon carnage. Whether it’s a crater-pocked desert landscape used by the navy as a bombing range or dead-animal disposal sites adjacent to contaminated military installations, he’s drawn to the imagery of aftermath. No surprise, then, that he headed to New Orleans in the fall of 2005 and began recording what the floodwaters had left behind. Among the many documentary records of Katrina’s devastation, Misrach’s images form a distinct and provocative subcategory: pictures of graffiti scrawled on wrecked buildings, vehicles, and even trees. The photos—which

As a photographer for publications like the Village Voice, Crawdaddy!, and Harper’s Bazaar in late-1960s and ’70s New York, James Hamilton captured one of the most vibrant music eras this country has ever experienced. His vast and spectacular archive from the time—black-and-white portraits, snapshots, and contact sheets—has been assembled for publication for the first time in You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen. There’s an exuberant Chuck Berry in performance, James Brown posing with thick shades, and shots of underground legends like Tom Verlaine and Sun Ra, as well as of the hoard of wild

My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He’s a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. “You can stay at my apartment, I’ve plenty of room. It’ll more than cancel out the price of the ticket to get here.” To entice me further he quoted a piece of graffito he had seen scrawled on the side of a building that afternoon: NO GOD, ONLY KINGS. “That’s the kind of place this is. Original. Enigmatic. Unexpected.” He reminded me that Joseph Stalin and George Balanchine

It all began with Billi Bi. The creamy, mussel-studded concoction “may well be the most elegant and delicious soup ever created,” according to 1950s food guru Craig Claiborne, and one taste of it in a friend’s kitchen is what sent me to a bookstore some fifteen years ago in search of a copy of The New York Times Cookbook. By then, Claiborne’s venerable tome was more than thirty years old—when I was growing up, its simple navy-blue cover with the gilded spine, long stripped of the dust jacket, was a regular sight in my mother’s kitchen. Never mind that unlike the works of Julia Child, that other

On July 24, 1926, Samuel Steward, one day past his seventeenth birthday, got word that Rudolph Valentino had just checked in to the best hotel in Columbus, Ohio. Grabbing his autograph book, he made his way to the hotel and knocked on Valentino’s door. The actor appeared, wearing only a towel, and after signing his autograph asked whether there was anything else the boy wanted. “Yes,” said Steward, “I’d like to have you.”

The Latin lover obliged. Steward performed oral sex on him and at some point procured a lock of Valentino’s pubic hair—a souvenir that Steward kept in a monstrance at his

In an interview posted on her website, the novelist Cathi Unsworth sits in a cloud of cigarette smoke, earnestly leaning forward, unsmiling, answering a question directly, with detail and passion. She looks like Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang's 1953 The Big Heat: the picture where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee in her face. On camera, Unsworth is almost flinching against herself, as if the trials she inflicts on her characters are swirling around her, along with her own smoke.