References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS, Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level. The wise and pithy Matt Dowd, a former Republican operative, said recently, “We rush to scandal before we settle on stupidity.” Washington just loves scandals; they’re ever so much more exciting than the daily grind of legislation—if there is any—and the tit-for-tat between the president and the congressional Republicans over the budget was becoming tedious. Faux outrage is a specialty here.

David Hurn/Magnum Photos

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” Wayne LaPierre asked the rapt crowd at the NRA National Convention in Houston earlier this month. The huge audience of firearm enthusiasts, who call themselves “freedom’s biggest army, its greatest and brightest hope,” clapped in approval, their eyes having been just opened to how differently things would have turned out had the four million Bostonians and the marathon runners all been packing heat and had drawn their weapons and opened fire at the first sound of explosion.

Herbert List/Magnum Photos

Margaret Fuller was known to perform the ancient form of divination in which a passage of Virgil selected at random is assumed to reveal what lies ahead. I thought I might follow Fuller’s lead, and greet the spring by serendipitously dipping into a trusted book for guidance. I determined to draw my first lot on March 21. The previous night, the equinox itself, my wife and I had heard, around midnight, a strange howling in the distance, probably a coyote, or perhaps an owl, though we both allowed ourselves to think that this was a wolf, perhaps a she-wolf, eager to found some new Rome on the outskirts of Amherst, Massachusetts.

K.M. Chaudary/AP Images

Although opposition leader Nawaz Sharif was favored going into Pakistan’s fraught parliamentary elections on Saturday, nobody predicted that his party would win so convincingly. The weeks leading up to the vote were marred by the worst election violence in the country’s history, combined with widespread fear that a divided electorate would fail to produce a government with sufficient clout to deal with growing intolerance, multiple insurgencies, and an imploding economy. But the strong victory by Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML) amid high voter turnout now holds the promise of greater stability—and with it the possibility that a civilian government might at last be equipped to tackle some of these challenges.

ERBP

Upstream Color, Shane Carruth’s long-awaited second film, begins with an extended sequence of victimization, extraordinary in its deadpan brutality. A young woman (Kris, one of only two characters given real names, played by Amy Seimetz) is stun-gunned outside a bar by a deceptively pleasant-looking man, referred to in the credits as the Thief. He forces a strange grub-like creature down her throat, and she wakes up as a sort of zombie—blank, passive, absolutely credulous and obedient. Over the course of several days, the Thief issues her a series of slightly surreal instructions, takes all her valuables, empties her bank account, even makes her take out a loan on her home to give him more money. Meanwhile, the creature squirms visibly under her skin.

Grandville

How far is language really able to communicate something new, something that runs contrary to my expectations? One of the intriguing aspects when teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them to say. In many cases, if a writer should come up with some perplexing idea, or, worse still, some declaration running contrary to received wisdom or political correctness, students, but also practiced translators, will end up reducing the text to something more conventional. Do we as readers subconsciously make these “corrections”? How far can they go?

Luis Acosta/Getty Images

From one moment to the next it wasn’t so funny anymore: Nicolás Maduro Moros, the late Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor, had gone on the campaign trail with the full backing of the chavista state, chavista judicial system, and chavista coffers. Everyone, possibly including the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski himself, expected him to win an easy victory. Yet on April 14, according to the officially impartial but unashamedly chavista electoral council, Maduro scraped out a tiny victory. Or perhaps he lost. And then chavismo collapsed into a scary collective insanity.

Joan Marcus/The Public Theater

Turning the life and times of Imelda Marcos into a piece of musical theater set in a disco is almost too obvious. And yet Here Lies Love, the musician David Byrne’s imagining of Imelda’s inner landscape, mostly works very well. The pop opera, brilliantly staged by Alex Timbers and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, is performed in a made up disco with constantly shifting stages sliding across the floor. As video clips are flashed onto the walls, in a kind of light show of Imelda’s public life, the mostly middle-aged audience is coaxed by a raucous DJ and pink-suited ushers into bopping along with the actors.

Grandville

Most dreams of writers aren’t about dead people or writing, and—like everyone else’s dreams—they aren’t very memorable. If you keep a dream journal, your mind will obligingly supply you with more dreams and shapelier ones, but you don’t always want that, nor can you necessarily make any sense of what you may have so vividly dreamt. Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising. Was this an anxiety dream? If so, which anxiety?

Alan E. Leib Collection

How can the most architecturally innovative part of the United States also be such a thoroughgoing urban mess? This spring and summer, two complementary exhibitions seek to bring the unfathomableness of LA into focus. The first, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,” which is at the J. Paul Getty Museum through July 21, explores how the city emerged through fitful initial development, explosive postwar growth, and a distinctive built legacy. The second, “Never Built: Los Angeles,” which opens at LA’s Architecture and Design Museum on July 13, examines a stunning array of unexecuted projects to show why the city didn’t become something else.