Roger Angell is now ninety-five and pretty much the last staffer at the New Yorker to have been part of its golden age. He literally grew up with the magazine, his mother, Katharine White, being its first fiction editor and his stepfather, E. B. White, one of its defining writers. As a result, when Angell recalls his childhood and youth, he remembers New Yorker galleys piled around the house, the sound of typing from White’s study, and parties where you might chat with James Thurber.

In nineteenth-century Paris, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar, took photographic portraits of everyone he knew. It’s quite a crowd: There are the illustrators Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré; the painters Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet; the composers Hector Berlioz and Gioachino Rossini; and the writers Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Charles Baudelaire. The standard Nadar shot is a three-quarter view, lit naturally from the left and a little above, with a plain mid-toned background and a sitter in dark clothes. If that sounds dull, a parade of his best work is anything but. His portraits are stark

Superficially, 2015 has been a banner year for Bill Bryson. After a long tour in development hell, the movie based on his 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods—his chronicle of a months-long trek, with an old friend, along the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail—finally found its way into American theaters in September. The film sported an all-star, long-toothed cast, including Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson. Robert Redford played Bryson, who in real life looks like your bearded, bespectacled, kindly uncle. It received mixed reviews. Domestic box-office numbers were about where you’d expect a moderately successful middle-aged-hiking-buddy comedy to be these days—$28,425,479,

There are a few ironclad rules in any world created by Nicholas Sparks. If you’re a man, you have square shoulders and muscles that reflect your belief in a hard day’s work. If you’re a woman, you have striking emerald eyes and blond hair, or hazel eyes to offset your high cheekbones. If you own a farm, a harmonica-playing black man full of hard-earned wisdom lives next door. If you’re Mexican, your parents own a restaurant and struggled to give you a better life. If you’re a warehouse, you’re located in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of town. If

There used to be a belief—or maybe it’s just a symptom of being young—that if you yelled and expressed great dismay at something or someone, it or he could thereby be stopped. This had to happen, didn’t it, once everyone had risen up and turned against this bad thing or person? Then, just maybe, we would be free of at least one torture. We could feel good!

Deuki Hong is throwing chunks of butter into a giant wok. It’s a late afternoon in December, and we’re in the kitchen of the restaurant Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong, on Thirty-second Street in Manhattan, making kimchi fried rice. Already in the wok are pork belly, onion, kimchi, and cooked rice. The hissing noise the mixture makes as Hong flattens it down with the back of a huge ladle is epic, louder than the music blaring in the narrow alley of cooking space lined with burners, woks, prep stations, and refrigerators. Louder, even, than the vacuums being used to clean several

That the arch-villain of the moment is a New York real-estate mogul does not surprise the city’s residents. Two new entries in the evergreen picture-book category of lost (or about-to-be-lost) New York evoke worlds, large and small, obliterated by avaricious Trump-style development. Adam Gopnik provides the suavely nostalgic introduction to PENN STATION, NEW YORK (Thames & Hudson, $50), a collection of densely dark, dreamlike black-and-white photos by Louis Stettner. Shot in 1958, five years before the old Penn Station was torn down, the series was inspired by an image Stettner made in 1957: It shows a little girl in a