Sasha Frere-Jones listens to Justin Timberlake’s latest album, “The 20/20 Experience,” and asks, “Can we be content with good nature and hard work when something more intense seems to lie beneath the surface? He never promised us a great transformation, and yet we’re still waiting for it.” Continue reading.

Photograph by Martin Schoeller.  

Will the Supreme Court recognize Edith Windsor?

Here, Amy Davidson writes that there is “something distinct about Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act… Windsor’s biography… isn’t so different from those of the Justices, or of those in their social and cultural circles.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Zg5iTM

Photograph: Bless Bless Productions.

Fiction editor Deborah Treisman talks to George Saunders about his new book, “Tenth of December”: http://nyr.kr/Wprlav

Photograph: Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux

“I paint the way someone bite his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don’t know nor can I do anything else.”

Picasso, 1962. Photograph by Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty.

Happy Birthday, Pablo Picasso. Here, a slideshow of portraits of the artist, and some of his words of wisdom.

“When the National Portrait Gallery called and said that in their eyes I was the best person to do the portrait, I was quite shocked,” Struth told me. “My immediate reaction was ‘What can I possibly do that’s not only affirmative but would include a message from me? Would I be able to say something new about people like this?’ ”

In celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, we’ve unlocked Janet Malcolm’s 2011 piece on Thomas Struth, who photographed Her Majesty for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery that honors her sixty-year reign: http://nyr.kr/oXTz1K

Desert Island Photo Books: Peter Van Agtmael

Katy Grannan, “Boulevard.”

I had seen bits and pieces of Grannan’s work but my ignorance of these portraits was met with dismay and shock by the fountain of photographic knowledge that is Curran Hatleberg. He then showed me small jpegs on the internet. Amazed, I ordered the book. It’s one of the best books of portrait photography I’ve seen and my favorite since I first saw Avedon’s “In The American West.” The cast of characters is impeccable, and the pictures are free and spontaneous despite being posed and shot with the slow-moving 4x5. That cover shot! Oh man, what a cover. It makes me want to go out and get drunk, smash my hard drives in a fit of despair, and start the whole thing over from scratch the next morning.

Hide/Seek: Sexual Identity in American Portraits

Today in California, the ban on same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court. The news reminded us of “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the current exhibition up at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, on view through February 12th, explores the role of sexual identity in modern art through a variety of media, including photography. For more selection of photographs, along with captions from the exhibition, visit our Photo Booth blog: http://nyr.kr/AgOCAM

Tim Barber’s Elusive Young People

Tim Barber, former photo editor at Vice and the man behind the online gallery tinyvices.com, has a new book out called “Untitled Photographs.” This compilation of snapshots, which Barber took over the course of fifteen years, is perhaps best summed up by Miranda July, who writes the intro:

What you have here are a few categories of pictures. One category I would maybe call Young People who, from the look of things, just had intercourse, right before or after the picture was taken. Next there is the category, I don’t know what to call it, but Tim seems to have not been able to catch the person in the viewfinder, which is bound to happen, and will probably happen less and less often as he gets more experienced. I will say that he gets an A for effort on these because looking at them, you can almost tell that a person just left or was just about to get there.

Joel Sternfeld’s First Pictures

Three decades after they were made, Joel Sternfeld’s earliest photographs have now been published as “First Pictures,” a selection of which are débuting today at Luhring Augustine Gallery. Taken between 1971 and 1980, the photographs document the travels of a young artist from busy streets to barefoot beaches, with inklings of Sternfeld’s now celebrated dark sense of humor, formalist experiments in color theory, and narrative tableaus. Click through for more selection of Sternfeld’s “First Pictures”:  http://nyr.kr/xOUcf0

Also, we are now on Instagram! If you’re on the platform too, please connect with us. Our handle is newyorkermag.

Postscript: Robert L. Carter

The civil-rights activist and former federal judge Robert L. Carter died Tuesday, at the age of ninety-four. Carter, seated above with Jack Greenberg, worked for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and presented its case in arguments that led to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This portrait, by Platon, was part of our project on leaders of the civil-rights movement, and was first published as part of our multimedia Portfolio “The Promise.” Photographs from this series are currently on view at the New York Historical Society.