My in-laws’ house is more than 115 years old, and when clearing out a newly discovered room in their basement—I think they knocked down a wall for some reason involving the heating system—they came across a stack of newspapers from 1912. In one edition, there was a full-page cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt as Icarus, his wings melting in the heat of a diabolically grinning sun. It’s framed and hangs in a guest bathroom, and it is my favorite item in their home. The idea of Roosevelt appeals to me, all excitedness and curiosity, almost-foolishness. I plan to read Edmund Morris’s trilogy—included in this week’s Brieflier Noted—once I have the time. Which I realize is a caveat Roosevelt never would have allowed.

This week’s Brieflier Noted included “The Golden Mean,” by Annabel Lyon, which sort of sounds like my wet dream in heaven as overseen by Santa Claus:

This vivid imagining of the encounter between Aristotle and the young Alexander the Great casts the philosopher as a manic-depressive, veering “from black melancholy to golden joy.”

Right?!

Think of that feeling you have when you’re on a truly great vacation: your stress levels drop, trivial concerns reveal themselves to be just that, and you feel—you know—that life’s purpose is deeper and simpler than what you’d believed before (side note: this happens to me every time I go to New Orleans). Now think of how you feel standing at the baggage claim once you’ve returned home. Bummer, right? (This happens to me every time I return from New Orleans.)

With “In Motion: The Experience of Travel,” Tony Hiss, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, insists that we can channel that feeling of interconnectedness and heightened experience—he calls it Deep Travel, caps and all—and use it to broaden our everyday life. Hiss kindly took the time to chat with me over e-mail; an edited version of our exchange appears on newyorker.com.

This week’s Brieflier Noted included “By Nightfall,” by Michael Cunningham; “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” by Douglas Starr; “Foreign Bodies,” by Cynthia Ozick; and “How to Live,” by Sarah Bakewell.

The selection from the “By Nightfall” review intrigued me: “Cunningham’s latest novel seems almost like a dare: can Auguste Rodin, Daisy Buchanan, Damien Hirst, Gustav von Aschenbach, and the rock band Styx all fit in a slim novel that spans only five days and unfolds almost entirely in Manhattan? As it turns out, absolutely.” I borrowed an extra copy of the book from the office and finished it this afternoon, and I might buy it for about a dozen people this Christmas, because God, Michael Cunningham is good:

There is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and the miscreants.

What do yesterday’s election results mean for women? This is the question I asked Rebecca Traister, a senior writer at Salon, whose book on the 2008 election, “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” is reviewed this week in The New Yorker. In her book, Traister focuses on the anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment that polarized the Democratic party, as well as the role of Michelle Obama in the White House and Sarah Palin’s representation of “a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.” Traister chatted with me over e-mail yesterday; read our exchange at newyorker.com.

Kicked off a new section on the Book Bench today: Brieflier Noted, which features a sentence–maybe even two! Crazy!–from each Briefly Noted book review in the magazine. I plan to do this every Tuesday. This week’s issue includes reviews on “The Convent,” by Panos Karnezi; “C,” by Tom McCarthy; “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” by Rebecca Traister; and “Where Good Ideas Come From,” by Steven Johnson.