Things Noted Here & There

Hugh Eakin, "What Went Wrong at the Getty," NYRB, 23 June, reviews Jason Felch's and Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum.

Frederic Raphael, "Ship of Fools," Literary Review, June, reviews David Pryce-Jones's Treason of the Heart: From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby.

Holland Cotter, "Modern Is Modern Is ...," NYT, 2 June, reviews "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories," an exhibit at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Adam Thirwell, "The Master of the Crossed Out," NYRB, 23 June, reviews Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future. Translated by Joanne Turnbull, with Nikolai Formozov.

Ian Johnson, "The High Price of the New Beijing," NYRB, 23 June, reviews Wang Jun's Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern Beijing, Chang-tai Hung's Mao's New World: Political Culture in the Early People's Republic, Robin Visser's Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China, Geremie R. Barmé's The Forbidden City, Thomas J. Campanella's The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World, and Wu Hung's Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.

Francis Wheen, "Crystal Balls-Up," Literary Review, June, reviews Dan Gardner's Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway.