Harry Nilsson was a ramshackle musical savant with a weakness for misbegotten life decisions and career-sabotaging swerves. Or maybe he was a scheming genius whose monastic devotion to idiosyncrasy made him a visionary in ways that have not yet been fully revealed. Either way, he was maybe the most innately talented rock star of the 1960s and ’70s— among stiff competition—as well as an enigma who jams the signals of standard stories of rock-star rise and fall.

In 2002, Doris Lessing spoke with Bookforum about social conformity, political passions, and how not having a social life helped her become a better writer.

In a sweeping essay on Italian painting, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Tao Lin, Zadie Smith considers the figure of the corpse, and the problem that death poses for artistic representation.

Until recently, many people—even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee—trusted Barack Obama. And even if they didn’t trust the person in the Oval Office, the American civic tradition tells them to find solace in the genius of the U.S. system of government, with its carefully calibrated array of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents from doing anything too terrible.

“Jonathan Franzen’s first novel was terrible,” writes Parul Seghal at Slate, but it is also a reminder that “great art seems to be born from what is narrow, obsessional, and repetitive in us.”

The subtitle of Rachel Cohen’s luminous biography of legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson is “A Life in the Picture Trade.” This is an apt characterization given Berenson’s role in building some of the greatest private Renaissance art collections of America’s Gilded Age (most notably Isabel Stewart Gardner’s). But it’s also one that Berenson would have looked upon with more than a little horror, since admitting he engaged in any kind of “trade” would conflict with his carefully constructed self-image, worked out over a lifetime of secrecy and reinvention.

Though the term genius is used rather promiscuously, few comics merit the label as much as Richard Pryor did. He was masterful—a truth teller, an incisive social critic, a man who opened up a great deal of the black experience to a general audience. He also plumbed his own personal experience with a flair for self-deprecation that could be as discomfiting as it was funny. Onstage, he hid little of himself: While performing at a gay-rights benefit in San Francisco, Pryor startled the crowd by declaring, “I’ve sucked dick … and it was beautiful.” Then, after inviting them to “kiss

When the British state decreed that the Guardian destroy all computers that had handled information from Edward Snowden, the paper complied, purchasing power tools to drill and grind laptops and hard drives to bits. But as Guardian publisher Alan Rusbridger writes, and as officials are “painfully aware,” technology has made it impossible to destroying this information—or to prevent its circulation.

Janet Maslin was not thrilled about having to review Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. The book is “long and demanding,” and it “isn’t invested in its characters.” Catton may have won this years Man Booker Prize, but the New York Times critic is not impressed.

I live in farm country in the Midwest. Last summer, the prairie was dry and haunted. Scorched cornfields stretched as far as the eye could see, the stalks standing tall and brown, bearing no fruit. On the local news every night, reporters talked about the blessing of crop insurance, and reported how nearly 90 percent of the state was suffering from the drought. Conditions were similar across the plains. This year was different: We were inundated by rainfall. Hundreds of acres flooded into small lakes big enough to have currents. “We’re the Seattle of the prairie,” was the joke, only

My favorite character on Boardwalk Empire, Eddie, Nucky Thompson’s obsequious Prussian bagman, killed himself because FBI agents used personal information to coerce him into collaborating against his beloved Nucky. After a Pilsner-fueled night of fraternizing with other German ex-pats (and Al Capone’s brother), sweet old Eddie was picked up by US agents. They held Eddie at an offsite location for 12 hours, offered no lawyer, and harshly interrogated (tortured) him, but still—Eddie did not crack!

Some years ago, I heard a fantastic story about Andy Warhol attending a banquet for wealthy Manhattan art patrons sometime in the 1960s. The tables were laden with all manner of delicacies—caviar, pâtés, the works. As Warhol stood near one of them and surveyed the spread, the hostess approached him and gaily suggested he help himself. There was a pause before he turned to her—not a hair of his silver wig out of place—and said, in a droll monotone, “I only eat candy.” Then he drifted off into the crowd, leaving her in stunned silence. Forget about his prints of