The relationship between modern celebrities and their greatest fans is rather like the relationship that once existed between cops and robbers in the movies. (And in life, if you believe the Mafia lore.) Classic cops and robbers have the same DNA: they understand each other, because, at some basic level, they are the same people. The Bling Ring (as the Los Angeles Times called them) already possessed many of the items they were stealing, but what they craved was proximity and identification.

“What we do is secret.” That motto is scrawled more than once in the fanzines assembled in The Riot Grrrl Collection, this first-ever collection of writings and artwork from Riot Grrrl, the early ’90s punk-based feminist movement whose critique of boy-centrism in music and art circles was co-opted by the Spice Girls, then resurrected by Pussy Riot.

Essayist George Scialabba is a rare bird, the sort of independent general intellect whose disappearance is so often lamented. Noted for his distinctive voice, well-furnished mind, and dizzying range, Scialabba is a kind of writer’s writer, earning high praise from luminaries such as the late Richard Rorty and the ornery critic Russell Jacoby. He was also awarded the first National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Remarkably, he has won his reputation without an academic imprimatur, maintaining a day job as a facilities manager at Harvard.

With her first novel, musician and memoirist Alina Simone proves herself a hilariously whipsmart chronicler of thirtysomething creative ambition. This is a breezily readable book that manages to pose big questions: Is meaningful art worth making if it requires the artist to exploit someone else? Is contemporary bohemia only possible when supported by unearned wealth? And just what the hell is the Internet really doing to our brains?

It’s no coincidence that growing alarm over America’s decreasing global influence corresponds with a growing hysteria over our child-rearing practices. Believing that “the children are our future,” as Whitney Houston so helpfully put it, is not all that different from believing in, say, stock futures. The monitors of stock and early-developmental portfolios certainly face the same basic question: How big a chunk are you willing to lop off your bank account, your sanity, and your soul in order to ensure that the future looks half as shiny and promising as you expect it to?

Flipping through the imposing art book that accompanies the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, which explores punk rock’s influence on fashion, is like hearing your favorite Screamers song played in a mall. First, you feel bad—it’s more proof that everything gets sold out. Then you suspect that it’s some kind of dada trick. How else to explain sentences like this: “In punk’s spirit of revolution, Moda Operandi is the first online luxury retailer to offer unprecedented access to runway collections from the world’s top designers.” In punk’s spirit of revolution, my first instinct was to set the

Lee Friedlander, Tucson, 2011. ALTHOUGH SCULPTED FROM PLASTIC instead of marble, mass-produced, and typically equipped with both arms, store-window mannequins share an aesthetic as well as a sociological lineage with the Venus de Milo. Depictions of feminine beauty whose aspect and proportion proffer benchmark ideals have been around a long time—no doubt many Athenian women […]

The presidential election of 1964 unfolds across a few colorless pages in Joshua B. Freeman’s American Empire, pitting a candidate who embraced “expansive state action” to “improve the quality of life” against a guy who opposed “the expanded functions the state had taken on during the previous three decades.” Circling back later, when the story has moved on to 1966, Freeman notes that some actor in California is still hanging around. Behold the elaborate flatness of this sentence: “Reagan, a one-time New Deal Democrat who over the years had moved to the right, came to national attention as a political