To make Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith has combed through archival radio and television broadcasts of painful events over the past six decades: there are chapters about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon; the explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger; the shootings at Columbine High School; the attacks at the World Trade Center; and the death of Michael Jackson — and he has transcribed the reports as they unfurled on the air, live and unmediated.

Beginning in the 1920s, an experimental literary modernism emerged in the small journals and tertulias of the major cities of Spanish America that would come to be known as the vanguardia. Its practitioners, mostly the sons of emergent bourgeoisies, adopted the methods of European modernists and altered them to fit the distinctive historical circumstances of early-twentieth-century Latin America—a moment when the region was both compelled by the imperial whims of the United States and drawn increasingly into the circuits of global capitalism. Few fictions of the vanguardia reflect the upheavals

The psychology of plain old everyday psychological time, the real, non-science-fictional stuff passing us by is the subject of British science journalist Claudia Hammond’s lively book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. It’s a book about mental apparatus. How do we know a moment has passed? Hammond’s best bet is that we use the brain’s dopamine system along with a few other brain components. “We are creating our own perception of time,” she writes, “based on the neuronal activity in our brains with input from the physiological symptoms of our bodies.” The answer is not in

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.

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.

Despite these