Mishima meets Mapplethorpe—that's one way of describing the erotic, often violent, gay manga of Gengoroh Tagame. Which, thanks to book designer Chip Kidd, is proving to be an unlikely sensation with North American manga nerds. Hazlitt talks to Kidd and the artist himself.

On Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, and why watching something can be the worst way to understand it.

Morgentaler, who died yesterday at the age of 90, weathered a lifetime of attacks for his role in providing safe and accessible abortions for Canadian women. He was a flawed man, too—a reminder that our heroes need not necessarily be saints.