In her account of her years in Teach for America, the lesson Michelle Rhee wants to impart is that success in the classroom takes time to achieve and depends mainly on discipline and toughness. In her first year she failed miserably: she was a nervous wreck who couldn’t control her classroom. But on the first day of her second year, she writes, she took a new approach: “I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares.” She describes making her students line up and walk into the classroom four times, until they had achieved a state of perfect order. “My mistake the

David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.

In his new memoir, Attempting Normal, comedian Marc Maron describes several of his more arduous experiences, from eating extra spicy chicken to rescuing feral kittens to bedding down-and-out prostitutes (only twice; he’s “not a hooker guy”). Maron’s comedic persona, which he has honed for the past thirty years, is both hostile and hypersensitive, and listening to him on stage or on his critically acclaimed podcast WTF can feel like eavesdropping on a therapy session. Airing painful personal history might not help him work through his issues (“if your life is disintegrating, saying so publicly

Aesthetics is, at its best and at its origins, a form of hunting. Not only a hunt for the beautiful and the sublime, but also for the ensnarement and identification of subtle experiences, ambivalent impressions, and novel sensations. If beauty and truth represent the big game—the promise of freedom, happiness, and peace on earth—the minor aesthetic categories are smaller, but still significant, quarry. Even in the eighteenth century, in the writing of Edmund Burke and Richard Payne Knight, Friedrich Schiller and Schlegel, the philosophy of taste often revolved around the marginal categories of

There is no question that David Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.

The Yacoubian Building, a 2002 novel by Alaa Al Aswany, weighs heavily on my time in Cairo, informs everything I see here, an unsentimental picture of an exigent, corrupted people. I pass the actual apartment house downtown, less grand than I imagined, occupied in the novel by several strata of Cairo life: a wealthy wheeler-dealer, a rising politician, a closeted gay newspaper editor, the poor who occupy a shantytown of windowless “iron rooms” on the roof, each of the rooms two by two meters square. The tragic beat of events turns monotonous, but the book is politically provocative, a devastating

In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones.