Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I got rid of six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and nonfiction. Gone were titles by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey—I’d rather reread Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities—plain old disinterest). Moby-Dick went (I’d tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (just never got around to them). What I did not—and never would—get rid of: The Snowy Day, Miss Rumphius, The Little House, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, Blueberries for Sal, and about 50 other children’s books. My copies have been with me since the 1970s and ’80s. They sit, always, in a place of honor, alongside artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. In 1991, when I left home for college, they moved with me from Davis, California, to New York City. From the East Village they traveled to Brooklyn, then Queens, then Brooklyn again, following me on a professional trajectory (half a dozen jobs) and a personal one (one marriage, one divorce). During my most recent move, purging my adult library created more physical space for my kid one—Caro’s books are roughly 20 times the width of an average Dr. Seuss title—but more important, the sifting represented a setting of priorities. The picture books took precedence. Again, I’m inclined to ask readers not to judge me. It’s a defensive crouch that comes from experience: I have heard numerous people suggest that in no way is “kid lit” on par with words written for grown-ups. (At least one of Margaret Wise Brown’s contemporaries dismissively referred to her genius works—Goodnight Moon, Little Fur Family—as “baby books.”) This kind of snobbery is what Mac Barnett, the author o

Picture, if you will, a gathering at Milan Fashion Week, hosted by one of the world’s glossiest magazines and attended by planetary VIPs. The event: a post-show dinner. The mood: celebratory. The setting: a rectory in a state of photo-friendly disrepair. Candles cast flickering light on the age-worn walls. Champagne flows. Every detail has been considered. Every invite has been curated. Every element of the evening, from the decor to the passed hors d’oeuvres, hews to the mandates of quiet luxury—save for the guests themselves, many of them clad in sequins and satin, all of them serving as reminders that luxury, even the quiet kind, has a way of making itself loud. The event might have been hosted by Vogue; this version was put on by Runway, the fictional publication in The Devil Wears Prada 2. In the film, it is a climactic scene: What goes down will decide the fate of the magazine and the people who produce it, including Miranda Priestly, the imperious and embattled editor in chief, and Andy Sachs, the newly installed features editor. The evening’s import is conveyed by the fact that the dinner is set not in a standard-issue rectory but in the one that belongs to Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie—the same room where, in the final years of the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci transformed a wall into the mural that would come to be known as The Last Supper.

In the late 1980s public-television stations aired a talking-heads series called Ethics in America. For each show more than a dozen prominent citizens sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator. The series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull, but at least one show was riveting in its drama and tension. The episode was taped in the fall of 1987. Its title was “Under Orders, Under Fire,” and most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school’s famous Socratic style. During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion. Ogletree asked Downs to imagine that he was a young lieutenant again. He and his platoon were in the nation of “South Kosan,” advising South Kosanese troops in their struggle against invaders from “North Kosan.” (This scenario was apparently a hybrid of the U.S. roles in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) A North Kosanese unit had captured several of Downs’s men alive—but Downs had also captured several of the North Kosanese. Downs did not know where his men were being held, but he thought his prisoners did. Never miss a story. Start your free trial.