This past holiday season, F. Scott Fitzgerald went from being considered a curse on Hollywood to the flavor of the month practically overnight. For decades, adaptations of Fitzgerald’s fiction were seen as surefire failures, but that all seemed to change with the release of David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the announcement that two new films were in the works: The Great Gatsby, to be directed by Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge), and something called The Beautiful and the Damned, which will be either an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s ambitious second novel or a biopic of the author and

In the course of a long career, I have read many books and reviewed a sizable number of them, but I have never encountered a title quite so felicitous as that of Jenny Davidson’s Breeding. Its subtitle, A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is equally ambiguous: The word breeding embraces the work of nature as well as that of nurture in the making of humans; partial is synonymous, on the one hand, with partisan or one-sided and, on the other, with imperfect or incomplete. These are the two double meanings Davidson explores, only to conclude that during the eighteenth

Human reason has this peculiar fate,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1781, “that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” He was talking about the way reason can speculate about, and yet not know, the ideas that transcend it. For some philosophers, consciousness—what Kant called the self—counts as one of these ideas. We can no more illuminate the nature of our selfhood than, as in a celebrated

On November 7, three days after Election Day, Alain Badiou gave a lecture at New York University on theater and philosophy. The discussion afterward, conducted in a mixture of French and English, quickly turned to the president-elect. “Obama?” Badiou replied. “As actor or as politician?” When the audience laughed, he explained that he did not mean the distinction negatively. While it was too soon to judge Obama as politician, Badiou stipulated, we could already judge him as actor, one who had broken with modern modes of self-presentation by returning to a classical style: sober, thoughtful, deliberate.

The wonderfully vivid photograph of the young Grace Hartigan on the cover of her newly published Journals takes me back to the time more than half a century ago when I first encountered the artist and her work. She had come to Vassar in 1954 to give an informal talk in conjunction with her solo show at the college art gallery. Ten years younger than she and an inexperienced instructor at my alma mater, I was immensely impressed with the power of her painting and just as excited by the forceful exoticism of her persona. She seemed so bold, so

New York’s Civil War– era underworlds aren’t what they used to be. Denounced in their own time by antivice crusaders as being so immoral that decency forbade even vague description, they’ve resurfaced with a vengeance in a remarkable succession of recent books that prowl in minute detail through the inventive urban libertinism of the 1850s and beyond. From these accounts, we know where the brothels were, who ran them, and how a typical evening progressed, from the parlor entertainment to the habits of the madams, johns, and sex workers (male and female) to the houses’ very plumbing. We know about the

A week after moving to New York, I hired a car service to take me to the commercial loading docks at Kennedy Airport. I was trying to pick up several cartons of books I had shipped from Paris. After signing for the contents, I proceeded to the Customs Office, where an agent was waiting to stamp the import papers. I had forgotten my passport; all I had was an expired, out-of-state driver’s license. “Kafka, eh?” he said, looking closely at the license, then at me. There was a pause. “I guess you must find this all pretty Kafkaesque!” He chortled—actually

Bill Traylor—born into slavery in Benton, Alabama, in 1853; poor and illiterate; the murderer of his first wife’s lover in the early 1900s; the father of a son who was killed by two Klan-member policemen in 1929; and a victim of Jim Crow’s systematic dehumanization—used art, as Mechal Sobel argues in her convincing study Painting a Hidden Life, as a way to order his inner turmoil and offer coded pictorial resistance to racist oppression. He was “the man with a fire in his belly that he painted a number of times.”