One day each week in grade school, I took pen in hand to practice penmanship. I painstakingly traced letters of the alphabet and made long strings of o’s that looked like Slinkys when completed. My teacher would rap my arm, insisting I conform to the prescribed Palmer Method position. Those circles—and the exhortation “Wider, wider, wider, rounder, rounder, rounder”—are inscribed in my hand even today. Kitty Burns Florey also turns to childhood memories to enliven Script and Scribble, her pithy account of the history of handwriting. It makes sense: We never forget our earliest experiences making our mark. The act

Should anyone doubt that the visual aspect of the comics form is its dominant narrative mechanism and the source of its idiosyncrasies, I can hardly imagine a more potent corrective than the works of French cartoonist Chris Blain. His command of the image—his lines, colors, and layouts; the moments and actions sliced and crunched and smeared across wide perspectives—drives his storytelling, while dialogue and narration traverse the mutable terrain of his grander world, his pages.

For all the glossy books that have appeared on contemporary Chinese art in the past few years, a basic overview—rather than an artist-by-artist glossary or a survey exhibition catalogue—has been slow to arrive. Art in America senior editor Richard Vine’s New China New Art goes a long way toward filling that void, offering a medium-based walk through the range of recent artistic production on the mainland. Five chapters devoted to painting, sculpture and installation, performance, photography, and video are accompanied by copious illustrations that get beyond the standard auction-catalogue fare. While Vine’s selections are largely informed by Western exhibition history

If there’s any discipline that could benefit from some linguistic punching up courtesy of Hollywood, it’s the study of foreign policy. The field’s vocabulary is weighted down with exhausted shibboleths like “hawks and doves,” Vietnam and World War II analogies, Harry S. Truman nostalgia, and a clutch of tersely modified variations on “power” (hard, soft, smart, etc.). It might seem a bit frivolous to seek analogies to the prudent exercise of US diplomacy in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Mob film The Godfather, but one has to start somewhere.

It seems fitting that Ronald Reagan’s ninety-eighth birthday, on February 6, coincided with the Senate Republican effort to stonewall President Obama’s economic-stimulus plan. Doomed to failure in a key cloture vote after a trio of moderates pledged support for a compromise plan, GOP senators nevertheless thronged to deliver droning denunciations of the package before the c-span cameras. Government spending couldn’t alleviate the downturn in the economy, they intoned, since, after all, the New Deal hadn’t alleviated the Great Depression; the nation’s mobilization for World War II had proved the real stimulus needed to put the Depression to rest.

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