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Der Kuntsenmakher fun Lublin perhaps should have been entitled The Trickster of Lublin when first it was published in English a half-century ago. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second novel established his American audience, which grew until his death at eighty-seven in 1991. Rereading it now in Yiddish and in English (the novel has just been reissued in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication) has been a mixed experience. The book set the formula for all his narratives long or short. They are prurient sagas of the flesh and of repentance, marked by the ambivalences of a vegetarian satyr.

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Pope Benedict XVI is the best-dressed liar in the world. And in England he presided over the best set-designed lie imaginable. He beatified the nineteenth-century Oxford theologian John Henry Newman, presenting him (in the penultimate step toward canonization) as a docile believer in papal authority, an enemy of dissent, and a rebuke to anyone who questions church authority. When the pope declared authentic the bogus miracle on which he bases the beatification—the claim that a deacon from Boston was cured of a spinal disease after praying to the cardinal—he said in a letter from Rome to England last February, “In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises, it is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate.” This is a Newman few who are acquainted with his radical views would recognize.

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Cleaning my basement recently, I came upon an issue of The New York Times dated Friday, April 13, 1990. The headlines tell about the East Germans issuing an apology for Nazi crimes, Americans finding excuses for not being part of the census, early glaucoma being found in President Bush’s eye, and the Pulitzer Prizes that were announced the day before. Inside, there are reports about the Soviet military unhappy with President Gorbachev after the Communist Party relinquished sole power in the government; the move of twenty Orthodox Jewish families in Jerusalem into some housing in the Christian quarter of the Old City, which provoked a protest by hundreds of Christian clerics who were sprayed with tear gas by the soldiers guarding the settlers; Britain seizing a big forged-steel tube made by a British manufacturer going to Iraq, because custom officials determined it could be used to build a missile launcher capable of hurling warheads for hundreds of miles—despite the chief executive of the company saying it would blow itself into pieces if they tried to use it as a weapon. How familiar all this sounds.

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At the beginning of September, a Beijing criminal court announced a decision that called attention to the difficult and sometimes tragic circumstances of millions of migrant workers in China who have left their countryside homes to work for low wages under deplorable circumstances in the cities. The court gave a three-year jail sentence to a man who ran an unlicensed, low-cost kindergarten for the children of these migrant workers. He was found to have left a group of such children without supervision in a locked room. A fire started. Eight of the children were saved by the owner of the building who, providentially, happened by at just that moment to collect unpaid rent, but one died.

There are an estimated 130 million nung-gong, or peasant workers, in China, making up what Lixin Fan, in his powerful documentary Last Train Home calls “the world’s largest human migration.”

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President Obama announced on August 31 that the main force of US troops has left Iraq, leaving about 50,000 Americans to help maintain the peace and support the Iraqi army and police. This was good news for American servicemen, their families, and the nation. But this departure should not be accompanied by a withdrawal of our support for the Iraqi people, particularly the millions of Iraqis who have fled their homes and who continue to live in limbo both inside Iraq and in other countries. During a recent mission to observe the situation of these displaced Iraqis, this reality became painfully clear to me.

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Several remarkable things have happened here in Italy in the past week. One: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, that self-styled man for all seasons—tycoon, soccer team owner, politician, crooner, swain—the perennial fixer who not too long ago said, in Milanese dialect, ghe pensi mi, “I’ll take care of it”—“il premier,” il Cavaliere (that is, Sir Silvio), has apparently been driven by the present political situation to say, “I don’t know what to do.”

I must have chosen the hottest week of the summer to fly down to North Carolina to watch Mark Hewitt, one of the best known ceramic artists now at work in America, fire his big groundhog kiln.

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The latest refurbishment of the White House Oval Office would be just another before-and-after decorating story were it not for the fact that stylistic aspects of the chief executive’s workplace are closely watched for possible insights into the personality of the occupant. As revealed to the nation in the president’s televised address about Iraq on August 31, the new décor indicates that however much vision Barack Obama may possess, he doesn’t have much of an eye.

With the unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent, President Obama used his Labor Day speech in Milwaukee to announce a new initiative to address America’s jobs crisis. The $50 billion in new government spending on transportation and public works that he is now proposing is badly needed, and would eventually create jobs. But even in the unlikely event that the plan wins Congressional support, it will not be sufficient to stimulate enough growth to create the millions of new jobs the nation needs. Why has there been so little urgency in the White House to confront the issue that will most directly affect the outcome of the November elections?

Last spring in Berlin, Peter Doig and Hilton Als co-curated an exhibition of portraits—mostly by young, unrecognized or forgotten artists—a show that included a rare look at the work of the remarkable but little known 20th-century Trinidadian painter Boscoe Holder (1921–2007). Here is a selection of his work, along with excerpts of a conversation between Doig, Als, and Angus Cook about the artist and his Caribbean milieu.