“It is pretty to see what money will do,� Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1667. It’s not happenstance that John Lanchester has named the fictional street at the center of his new novel, Capital, after Pepys. The money-obsessed residents of Pepys Road in South London—bankers and their wives, strivers from foreign lands, gadflies, homebodies, and troublemakers—would have seemed, despite the 300-year gap, pleasingly familiar to the great London diarist. As a shady businessman, a lover of ladies, a chronicler of a city already bursting at the seams, Pepys would have quite enjoyed Capital. And future historians might find the minutely detailed novel as useful a guide to London at the Great Recession as we, today, find Pepys’ diaries to London at the Great Fire.

These images are from photographer Rania Matar’s new book, A Girl and Her Room, a collection of photos taken in the United States and the Middle East. The following is excerpted from Susan Minot’s introduction to the book.

Today, if you’re pregnant with a defective fetus, you won’t know about the problem till you’re well along. At 10 to 12 weeks, you can get chorionic villus sampling, which involves extracting tissue from the placenta by going through your abdomen or inserting a tube through your cervix. At 15 weeks or so, you can get amniocentesis, which involves sticking a long needle through your belly to draw amniotic fluid. Both tests are uncomfortable, and in one case out of every 100 to 200, they cause a miscarriage.

The wishful scenario many Republicans envisioned after Barack Obama’s change of heart this month on gay marriage—the president’s African-American base, far less supportive of expanding marriage than other parts of his coalition, becomes demobilized or even defects as a result of Obama’s stance—already seems unlikely to be realized. Last Thursday, Public Policy Polling revealed a 36-point swing in black support for gay marriage among Maryland voters, who will have the chance to legalize the practice in a November referendum, since PPP’s last poll on the subject in March. Then, 56 percent had been opposed to the new marriage law and 39 percent supported it. In May, PPP found the numbers nearly reversed: 55 percent supported, and 36 opposed. By all indications, black voters weren’t abandoning Obama over an issue on which they disagreed, but adjusting their opinions to match his.

On Thursday night, 14-year-old Snigdha Nandipati won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, acing the word "guetapens" in the final round. Nandipati, who beat out fellow Indian-Americans Stuti Mishra and Arvind Mahankali to win the title, was the fifth consecutive Indian to take the Scripps crown and the 10^th in the last 14 years. Two years ago, Ben Paynter revealed the secret to Indian spelling success: a minor-league circuit sponsored by the North South Foundation. The original article is reprinted below.

When is a book no longer a book?  I wasn’t expecting to have my mind blown by the iPad app of the children’s story Another Monster at the End of This Book. The tale, of course, is about itself: Grover, fresh from the nightmare of There’s a Monster at the End of This Book, cooks up a half-dozen schemes to prevent the reader from turning pages to get to the promised fright at the end. (Spoiler alert: In a Shyamalanian twist, the monster is, once again, Grover himself.) In the sequel, Grover is joined by Elmo—a casting move nakedly designed to appeal to a younger demo—who, eager to meet the monster, encourages us to subvert all of Grover’s defenses.

Your level of enjoyment, when it comes to Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, may very well depend on whether you’re willing to read an entire book for the sake of being sarcastic. I bought it from a used bookstore when I was in my mid-20s. I had heard that it was about a desperate single woman in New York. I was young; I was hip; I was a woman in New York. I bought the book as a defiant feminist gesture, a statement on all I would never be.

In the epilogue of Linda Hirshman’s breezily written history Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, one of her interview subjects asks her, “Do you really think you ought to call it Victory?� After all, only six states allow gay people to marry, while 30 have constitutional amendments barring it, and the federal government refuses to recognize any same-sex marriage or to pass a long-stalled nondiscrimination law. On top of legal inequality, LGBT Americans are disproportionately prone to attempting suicide, to being bullied and assaulted, and to struggling with depression and anxiety. Transgender Americans face even greater challenges in securing both equal rights and equal dignity.

Barely 10 pages into the first chapter of Kirsten Grind's The Lost Bank comes the first of many elaborate musical interludes. The year is 1987, the theme is a modified Wizard of Oz, and the occasion is the 63rd birthday of the bank’s universally beloved, unbelievably benevolent and comprehensively folksy CEO Lou Pepper.