In This Old Man, his recent collection of autobiographical and critical writings, Roger Angell fondly recalls how his boyhood was shaped by the fabled Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

It was published in 1911, the same year my old man graduated from college, and I think he must have picked up ours early on; by the time I got into it—and into "Aboukir" and "Armor" and "Muscular System" (great drawings), "Reptiles" and "Zanzibar," along with "Ship"—each slender, blue leather-bound volume would leave a crumbly dust of learning in my lap when I got up to put it away.

Others have claimed the Eleventh as an early literary influence. Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the Britannica's place of honor in

Many of our finest poets—think of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—are also known as major critics, but in Susan Howe's case, it has always been difficult to separate the two practices. My Emily Dickinson (1985), the book that first brought Howe wide attention, is at once revisionary scholarship, careful close reading, and aphoristic meditation on the writing process—a book that tells us at least as much about Howe's own poetics as about Dickinson's. My Emily Dickinson was prompted, at least in part, by Howe's objection to the portrayal of Dickinson as a kind of "madwoman in the attic" in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's celebrated feminist study of that title.

George Papaconstantinou has been through hell. His reputation as the finance minister who cowrote and signed Greece’s first bailout agreement with the eurozone in the spring of 2010 cost him his cabinet post the following year and his parliament seat the year after that. He spent the next three years fighting charges that he tampered with state documents to help relatives evade taxes, which could have jailed him for life.

During all this time, Greece went through four changes of government, each bringing more pain and austerity than the last, while its recession spiraled into a full-blown depression. Both socialists and conservatives found it convenient to make a sacrificial lamb of Papaconstantinou as the bringer of

Cincinnati

‘C'mon. Name names." So asks one young man to another, both sitting on a park bench in Washington's Dupont Circle. One of them has just attended the wedding of a high-profile senator, and his newfound friend, like any good Washington social climber, pries him for the guest list.

It's the sort of conversation that could transpire between any two people in our nation's capital, at any point in time. But the year is 1953, and the senator in question is no ordinary solon but Joseph McCarthy, then at the height of his anti-Communist purge. In this context, asking someone to "name names" is rife with innuendo.

And not just of the politically inquisitorial variety.

This wonderfully perceptive memoir follows Matthew Gilbert’s transformation during his first year as a reluctant dog owner.

Last year I had an annoying medical issue that cost me several thousand dollars to explore. I say “explore" because the problem never got solved, at least not by the two physicians I originally consulted. Nonetheless, I had to pay for the relief that I sought, but never got. The biggest expense was for the CAT scan, which proved to be not particularly helpful.

People routinely complain that if your mechanic doesn't fix your car, or if the middle C is still flat after the piano tuner's visit, you shouldn't have to pay. But medicine isn't like car repair, because there are many more things that can go wrong with the human body. Especially if it is an upscale foreign import.

Back in 1975, Richard Wilbur—probably the greatest translator of poetry into English that America has ever known—published a pair of rhyming riddles he had translated from the Latin of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk named St. Aldhelm. Practitioners of formal poetry are always lured by Latin, and especially by the neatness, economy, and precision of its smaller forms. English is a messy, sprawling language; it has to be forced into the Romance literary shapes that have defined poetry since the Renaissance. But Latin—ah, there's a language that wants to be concise and clever. A language that wants to do epigrams, aphorisms, and riddles.

In the fall of 1870, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. sat his 12-year-old son down for a conversation that would have condemned a lesser person to a lifetime of depression and despair. He had the right mind for success, his father told him, but not the body to support it: “You must make your body," he said. "It is hard drudgery. .  .  . But I know you will do it." Theodore Jr. went on to "do it." He pumped iron at Wood's gymnasium on the Upper East Side, canoed in the Adirondacks, chased down bison in the West, thus developing his famous barrel chest—supplemented, over the course of time, by a stomach to match. The latter would eventually earn him, among his African carriers, the nickname "Bwana Tumbo,"

The nifty suspense thriller Nerve captures lightning in a bottle as it tells a cautionary tale about the role of social media in the lives of America’s teenagers. And though it was made to appeal to teenagers, I think Nerve will have the greatest emotional resonance with the parents of teens and near teens.

We live in a state of anxiety about the dual existences our kids lead as they walk and talk and move in the real world and yet fall constantly into the rabbit hole of an anarchic virtual world that has yet to establish any protective or defensive norms or codes of conduct.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is remembered by most people only as a name—the name of the woman who shot Andy Warhol. On the day of the shooting, June 3, 1968, Warhol was at the pinnacle of his fame, first as a pop artist, and then, as the 1960s progressed, a cinematic auteur.

As Americans, we take Stuart Davis for granted. Although he has achieved a certain canonic status, in practice that means little more than that we no longer feel that we really need to look at him. It takes an exhibition like the Whitney's "Stuart Davis: In Full Swing" to see, with redoubled force, just how good he really was. His works are striking, original, and, in their way, perfect, allying the exuberance of a jazz musician to the precision of a jeweler.

Davis, who was born in Philadelphia in 1892 into a family of illustrators and died in New York City in 1964, does not fit comfortably into any of the existing taxonomies of art history.

You swipe your bank card to pay for your groceries and watch the screen for the expected prompts. But in the ensuing interval, before you are able to complete your transaction, you are presented with a series of advertisements. Or you check in to your hotel and notice that the key card you are given is emblazoned with an advertisement for a restaurant. Or, yet again, seated on your airline flight, you pull down the tray from the seat-back in front of you and find the tray top devoted to some advertisement or other.

In each of these situations, your attention has, in effect, been seized and held captive, however briefly.

In the opening salvo of her latest collection of essays—her sixth—Cynthia Ozick takes aim at those who express alarm about dwindling audiences for literature in the age of mass media:

The "fate of the novel," that overmasticated, flavorless wad of old chewing gum, is not in question. Novels, however they may manifest themselves, will never be lacking. What is missing is a powerfully persuasive, and pervasive, intuition for how they are connected, what they portend in the aggregate, how they comprise and color an era.

What is missing, in other words, is serious criticism. This is not, in Ozick's view, on offer from dry-as-dust professors or academic theorists who "have for decades marinated

Translation, in its etymological roots, is a carrying over, a bearing across. Three years after the death of Seamus Heaney, his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI appeared this spring in this slender volume. The book, in its posthumous publication and focus on the underworld, is itself a portage across the River Styx, a retrieval from the land of the dead and the colloquially "dead" language of Virgilian Latin. As in his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (2000), an international bestseller, Heaney's take on the heart of this Roman epic performs a literary resurrection of sorts, bringing Virgil's poem—and his own voice—vividly alive.

Turin

Turin is Italy’s Cinderella city. While everybody knows her showy older sisters Rome and Florence, she has the reputation of being chained to the chimney of industry; she was home to the Fiat automobile factory. Yet Turin's allure, like Cinderella's, lies precisely in her mystery. She escapes the majority of guests. Cupped in a steep Alpine valley, her architecture is at times reminiscent of Paris, with its wide, tree-lined boulevards; but the cafes and pastries, the vanilla stucco of the palaces, also recall Vienna. This is Italy, but with a glass slipper of cool mountain air: deep crimson, luxuriant cherries in spring; cream from cows grazed on Alpine pastures; and red wine with a subtle aroma of

"As a London Times correspondent in Tehran, in 1952, he watched as a hired mob congregated outside his hotel and chanted, 'death to Mr. Bunting!' Guessing, correctly, that nobody calling for Mr. Bunting's death had ever seen the man, Bunting joined the mob and chanted along with them. Soon after, he and his family fled the country, driving from Iran to Bunting's mother's house in England—a one-month trip—in a company car."

Fifty years ago, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. It struggled through 79 meh-rated episodes before it was cancelled. No one knew it would prove to be the most influential piece of American popular culture of the past half-century.

Before Star Trek, science fiction was the Rodney Dangerfield of the genres; in its wake, SF and its fantasy and comic-book offshoots have become the dominating cultural exports of the United States. Indeed, the obsession of Hollywood today with the "intellectual property" model—the way Hollywood refers to a product line that includes movies, television shows, video games, books, and toys, that all stem from a singular root—dates back specifically to Star Trek.

A beautifully carved marble votive relief of Asklepios, the god of medicine, leaning on his staff welcomes us as we enter The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander at the National Geographic Museum. The noble procession of the god and his children confronting a group of worshippers echoes, on a small scale, the sculptures of the Parthenon frieze. This remarkable object is but 1 of some 550 pieces sent from the collections of 21 Greek museums, from Athens to Vergina, making this exhibition the most comprehensive in a generation. Washington is the final stop of its two-year tour of North America, so visiting the National Geographic this summer is not only your last chance to see this show but the next best thing to a trip to Greece.

What’s it like to be in the heart of a jihadist? He called her his "baby." Each morning she awoke to a string of missed Skype calls asking where she was. They talked for hours each night. "He" was Abu Bilel, the French right-hand man of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and she was an undercover reporter he had unwittingly fallen for. In the Skin of a Jihadist tells the story of how a young French journalist found herself being digitally courted by a high-level ISIS commander. Having written about many of the teenaged girls who ran away to ISIS-controlled territory after conversing with fighters online, Anna Erelle found herself in the center of the story—being wooed herself.

The Alien and Sedition Acts almost strangled the American republic shortly after its birth. Terri Diane Halperin, who teaches at the University of Richmond, has written a lucid and concise account of a controversy whose importance to American history is not to be underestimated.

As their names suggest, the acts took aim at two perceived threats to the young republic: the influx of recent immigrants to America and the “seditious" criticism by citizens of their own government. The debate over these enactments reflected two starkly different visions of the kind of nation America should be.

It’s unfair to say that athletes, and the people who discuss them, commit more penalties against the English language than anyone else in our culture—pop musicians, actors, politicians, and academics are all in foul trouble. But sports personalities have their own unique brand of cringeworthy clichés ("110 percent"), monotone modesty ("just trying to contribute to my team"), embarrassing braggadocio ("we shocked the world!"), and gruesome grammar ("You mad, bro?"). Bryan Garner's entry on "defense" in Modern American Usage perfectly distills their terrible influence:

The standard pronunciation has long been with the accent on the second syllable. . . .

In a contest for the best novels of the past four centuries, the winners, surely, are: for the 17th century, Don Quixote; for the 18th century, Tom Jones; for the 19th, War and Peace; and for the 20th, Remembrance of Things Past, or as it is now increasingly known in English, In Search of Lost Time. A Spaniard, an Englishman, a Russian, and a Frenchman—what a motley crew their authors comprise! Cervantes was the son of a barber-surgeon; Fielding was a journalist, a jurist, and scion of the squirearchy; Tolstoy, of course, a nobleman; and Proust a half-Jewish, fully homosexual flâneur.

The theme of the story of art, unlike that of the sciences, is not, whatever else it may be, one of progress. In science, discovery