Balenciaga’s 1950s baby-doll dress. Courtesy Balenciaga Archives Balenciaga head designer Nicolas Ghesquière just ended his fifteen-year stint to be replaced by Alexander Wang, who could, says The Guardian, take the brand into a more “mass market” and less “elitist” direction. One wonders if Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972)—the master craftsman who didn’t even know from “brands,” and […]

Though he’s primarily associated with sad-suited midcentury businessmen, Dale Carnegie, who frequently aired his boredom with traditional career hierarchies and hymned his devotion to the power of personality, seems more like a precursor to many a modern tech entrepreneur. Hard labor, Carnegie argued, is less a path to success than fresh ideas are. Old models are to be questioned, then modified or thrown out completely. As Steven Watts suggests in his new biography, Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America (Other Press, $30), the conventional-wisdom business guru presaged many of the bedrock concepts of the information economy.

Dan Brown’s new thriller takes its title from the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy. While that epic poem and its author’s native Florence provide the novel with its geographic, aesthetic, and literary backdrop, a less-celebrated work bears equally upon the narrative’s thread. Brown might just as well have titled his book The Principle of Population, in homage to early-nineteenth-century demographer Thomas Robert Malthus, whose polemical theories on world population spur the machinations of Brown’s bad guy, Bertrand Zobrist. A kind of mad genetic scientist, Zobrist is hell-bent (quite literally) on curbing the planet’s exponentially growing population. He hatches a

What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter’s pellucid first novel, “The Apartment,” it may be simply the length of a day

Aspiring essayists tend to worship at the altar of Joan Didion. Her lyrical prose—with its rhythmic repetitions, its dramatic expressions of regret and longing caught in lockstep with the failings and farces of our culture—lures readers into a state of deeply romantic woe. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes in The White Album—a not-so-subtle suggestion to young writers that it isn’t merely important for them to spin their angst into dense, poetic passages; it’s necessary for their survival. In Didion’s hands, we are exquisitely aware of every tragic molecule that makes up our vast, bewildering universe.

Stained-glass facade of the Horn & Hardart Automat, New York. I have always been inordinately fond of things with moving parts—pinball machines, record players, those clocks and watches in which you can see the gears and sprockets turning as the seconds tick away. As such, one of my great regrets in life is that I […]

When mass demonstrations began erupting throughout the towns and cities of Egypt three years ago, there seemed to be no author more inappropriate to the moment than the late Albert Cossery. A legendary advocate of idleness and enervation, his writing felt totally at odds with the energy and euphoria of the protests on Tahrir Square. “Reading his novels amid the exhilaration of the uprising, Cossery seemed irrelevant or, happily, wrong,” reflects Anna Della Subin, who found herself in Cairo that winter with a pile of old, dusty copies of his books. And yet, that was more or less the exact