Even among the crew of language-besotted artists—Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Nauman—the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat stands out as especially devoted to words as subject matter. Indeed, enigmatic poems rather than images constituted his earliest forays as a graffiti artist (in a duo with the nom de plume SAMO©). But the move to canvas hardly diminished his affection for painted words, numbers, sentences, and names. In WORDS ARE ALL WE HAVE: PAINTINGS BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (Hatje Cantz, $60), several critics survey the artist’s language-based art, and a verse response from Thomas Sayers Ellis enacts a conversation

Folks in general, especially those of varied shades of pink and brown most in need of his wisdom and perspective, still haven’t discovered, much less figured out, Albert Murray. It’s not as though they haven’t had enough time to try. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Murray’s birth, and he almost made it to the centennial finish line, missing it by three years. His first book, The Omni-Americans, published in 1970 when he was fifty-four, was a collection of essays submitting vibrant, complex, and liberating counterarguments to those—well-intentioned or not, militant and moderate alike—who insisted on depicting the black-American

At the end of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when the two hapless title characters, aboard their fatal voyage, open the letter that sentences them to death, Guildenstern says: “Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths? . . . To be told so little—to such an end—and still, finally, to be denied an explanation—” He doesn’t finish the sentence, of course; “to be denied an explanation” is simply his life’s condition. In fictional narratives, and in the narratives we piece together uneasily out of history, some lives always seem like that: shapeless, except

IF YOU BELIEVE New York City’s ongoing infestation of sliver towers and chain stores is ruining the town you love, you may find some small cheer in knowing how much worse things could be. Never Built New York provides detailed, copiously illustrated accounts of citywide plans spanning a century—a few intriguing, others fanciful, many examples of outright vandalism—that highlight how technological change, commercial exigencies, and architectural vanity could combine to distastefully ill effect. In his late-1960s effort to “reimagine” Robert Moses’s doomed Lower Manhattan Expressway, the much-esteemed Paul Rudolph designed a futuristic concrete pyramidal structure—in places sixty stories high—that would

In the jet-set portrait extravaganza Slim Aarons: Women, the captions home in on a subject’s status like surface-to-air missiles:

Now that Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) is out of contention, it’s safe to say no sitting Supreme Court justice has the adoring fan base Ruth Bader Ginsburg has. It’s rare for a justice to acquire any sort of public personality; Samuel Alito and Stephen Breyer, for instance, are both ciphers. Clarence Thomas is a mostly mute memento of his bruising confirmation hearings twenty-six years ago. Even Chief Justice John Roberts occupies an eerie middle ground between the Federalist Society’s version of a Blade Runner replicant and the half-forgotten actor who played the heroine’s dim boyfriend on some crappy 1970s sitcom. But

It is bracing, in a way I could never have anticipated six months ago, to read a book that chronicles the exploits of dictators who rose to power in the twentieth century alongside descriptions of the food they liked to eat. Dictators’ Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants (Gilgamesh Publishing, $23) is filled with photos and food-related anecdotes from this most exclusive club—all male, of course, though a few infamous wives, like Imelda Marcos and Elena Ceauşescu, make cameos—as well as a recipe for each despot. These days, it feels a little less like a lighthearted romp through

In HIGHWAY KIND (Aperture, $50), we see Justine Kurland’s on-the-road photographs as if through a film of fantasy—a very masculine, very American fantasy, about freedom and self-reliance and the big wide open. There are shots of trains running through majestic Western landscapes—a pass, a canyon—and of hobos sitting in trees or reclining on riverbanks. Like Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston before her, Kurland pays special attention to the quotidian aspects of back-road American life: rail yards, litter-strewn campsites, tires piled outside auto-repair shops, the parking lot of a motel or a 7/11. There are wide vistas, and then there are

“THEY COULDN’T BE quite as wild as artists.” This was how a colleague explained the psychologist Donald MacKinnon’s choice of architects as subjects for his landmark 1958–59 study of creativity at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. MacKinnon had begun to focus on creativity a few years earlier, but he recognized one clear problem: Creativity could obviously take many forms—from the poet’s mad genius to the scientist’s brilliant logic. MacKinnon could never hope to gather all creative types into a single study. But what if he could find a middle ground, a creative practice where imagination evolved in