Recently at a social gathering, when a guest found out I was a writer, he asked, “Would I have heard of you?” I dutifully told him my name — no recognition, fine, I’m not that famous — and then, at his request, I described my novels. “You know, contemporary, I guess,” I said. “Sometimes they’re about marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children.” After a few uncomfortable moments he called his wife over, announcing that she, who “reads that kind of book,” was the one I ought to talk to. When I look back on that encounter, I see a lost opportunity. When someone asks, “Would I have heard of you?” many female novelists would be tempted to answer, “In a more just world.”

It’s easy to laugh, but let’s not forget: we’re really laughing at love. Abbey Road Studios could be the nearest thing this city has to a holy place, and for many coming here is not a day out, it’s a pilgrimage.

Action films meant something. As surely as the film noir communicated anxiety over postwar urban upheaval or as alien-invasion films helped us work out our cold-war agita, the action films of the golden age were a post-’70s, poststagflation collective national fantasy: one in which America was strong, independent, unstoppable and perpetually kicking much butt.

They are a species of cool-hunting, of celebrity obsession. The Radio City extravaganza was an extremely commercial, big-ticket enterprise. It was artistry, and extremely worthwhile. But it was also a concert at Radio City Music Hall, home of the Rockettes. Klaus Biesenbach has made his name as an exceptionally gifted cultural truffle hound—he’s not so much a journalistic beat, on the Moby model, as an institutional network unto himself.

From the outset Coco Chanel’s celebrity depended on confounding the woman and the dress: her life and her clothing echoing each other’s meanings, evincing lifestyle fantasies for a world reborn.

Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris is at once a study of the evolution of the idea of Paris and an attempt to preserve the experience of its physical history—the latent historical meaning that has accrued on every corner—including the many inconvenient wrinkles that have been paved over and sandblasted and designed out of existence in the past fifty years and will soon lie beyond the reach of living memory.

We have now arrived at the point in Mad Men’s evolution where every main character is echoing the life pattern of another one.

Toward the end, a man asks Lena Dunham a reasonable question: Given her success, has it become harder to inhabit a girl like Hannah, who is incapable of doing a job interview without sabotaging it with a rape joke?

“How do I express this without getting too personal with you?” asks Dunham. “That lostness and that questioning—I wish I could say that it completely went away when you were getting to do the thing you wanted to do, but unfortunately, that’s not the truth.” Her work is going gangbusters, she admits—her personal life, those daily mortifications, that’s another matter. “I’m just fuckin’ it up all other kinds of ways.”