Daniel Handler, the author best known for his children's novels written under the name Lemony Snicket, is drawing fire for a racially charged joke he made Wednesday night while hosting the National Book Awards. Handler's comments came after Jacqueline Woodson, who is African American, was awarded the prize for young people's literature for her book "Brown Girl Dreaming." Handler said: "I told Jackie she was going to win, and I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind."

Handler continued, "I said, 'You have to put that in a book,' and she said, 'You put it in a book.' And I said, 'I'm only writing a book about a black girl who's allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama, saying "This guy's OK. This guy's fine."'" The comments drew some nervous laughs from the crowd.

The joke drew sharp criticism...

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, is it possible to discover new information about the lives of those who perished? According to Glenn Kurtz's haunting new book, "Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film," the answer is "Yes … but hurry."

What ignites Kurtz's obsession with his family's past is a home movie. His grandfather, David Kurtz — a Polish immigrant who'd prospered in the neckwear business — sailed from New York with his wife and two friends in summer 1938 for a tour of Europe's grand attractions. To document the vacation, David Kurtz toted a brand-new movie camera.

The choppy film he brought home, intended solely for his family, totaled 14 minutes. When, decades later, his grandson retrieved the footage, he discovered that three of those minutes — mostly in color — were taken in his grandfather's hometown in Poland, a small predominantly Jewish town called Nasielsk, north of Warsaw.

"The instant these scenes appeared," Kurtz writes,...

If there was ever a subset of humanity ripe for anthropologizing, it's the art world. This caravan of artists, critics, curators, collectors, dealers and assorted hangers-on are united by a purported interest in art and a language called "artspeak." (In this incomprehensible tongue, a painting is never a painting, it's a platform in which to problematize questions of perspective and form.) It's a milieu in which some famous figure (say, Jeff Koons) can make farcical pronouncements — "I want the viewer to feel that their cultural history is absolutely perfect" — and no one stops to ask what that could even mean.

Journalist and sociologist Sarah Thornton, a former correspondent for the Economist as well as a contributor to industry bible Artforum, has been reporting on this curious tribe for some time. For her first book, "Seven Days in the World," published in 2008, she documented in engaging, conversational language the various structures that make up the art industry. She went to an...

If you're the kind of reader who likes to plan ahead, file this under "Beach Reads 2016": Mike Love, the co-founder of the Beach Boys, is writing an autobiography for Blue Rider Press, a Penguin imprint.

The book, with the working title "Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy," will be co-written with James S. Hirsch and released in summer 2016, according to a press release from Blue Rider.

"I’ve had an incredible life with a lot of triumphs, my share of heartbreak and some pretty amazing experiences," Love says in the press release. "There are a lot of things I haven’t shared before, and I’m looking forward to opening up about my life and my work in this book. It’s a story about family, music, a country in transition, and audiences all over the world coming together in harmony."

Love, 73, was a lead singer and lyricist for the Beach Boys, best known for his work on the band's earlier, more carefree songs, like "Fun, Fun, Fun" and "California Girls." He had a famously complicated...

On the morning after the National Book Awards, speaking by phone from a Manhattan hotel, Ursula K. Le Guin was feisty, smart and pointed — exactly as we might expect.

“I don’t want to put writers against publishers,” she said, referring to her remarks Wednesday evening, as she accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “but if we want independence, we have to make it. We are not slaves of the corporation.”

Le Guin’s comments were an extension of a speech that was the highlight of the ceremony at the Manhattan restaurant Cipriani.

But then, it can be exhilarating to speak truth to power.

This is what the 85-year-old Le Guin did, first taking a moment to “rejoice in accepting [the award] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long” — authors of science fiction and fantasy — before offering an impassioned defense of books as more than mere commodities.

“We just saw,” Le Guin observed, referring to Amazon.com Chief...

A thought commonly attributed to George Orwell holds that good people can sleep at night only because rough men are awake and ready to protect them. But in the modern world, two other groups are also vital to a sound sleep: software engineers and computer geeks.

That's the scary but well-documented thesis of "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex" by Shane Harris, a deep dive into the world of cyberwar and cyberwarriors. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks involved planes crashing into buildings; the next could be a surprise shutdown of computer systems that control the U.S. economy and government and much of its military capability.

"There is no concept of deterrence today in cyber," a former hacker turned security executive tells Harris. "It's a global free fire zone."

The U.S. military and intelligence community, Harris reports, were slow to join the cyberarms race but are now muscling up apace, only modestly slowed by the revelations by former National Security Agency...