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Staff Picks: ‘Betsy-Tacy,’ Doomed Quests

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This Week’s Reading

If you have children to shop for, you can do them no greater favor than to introduce them to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, the first four volumes of which were just rereleased with original Lois Lenski illustrations by Harper Perennial. —Sadie Stein

“This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that.” That’s Ice Cube rhapsodizing on Ray and Charles Eames’s Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades. The short video, in which Ice Cube praises L.A.’s architectural sublimity, is part of “Pacific Standard Time,” an exhibition I wish (impossibly) were traveling to the East Coast. —Nicole Rudick

Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ.  —Lorin Stein

If you are in New York this winter, stop by the Asia Society to see Sarah Sze’s kinetic new show “Infinite Line.” I’ve always been drawn to Sze’s webbed sculptures, but this time I particularly liked a series of pen-and-ink llustrations, each of which depict twelve seminal (but confidential!) events in the lives of friends and collectors. Each unfurls with Escher-like intricacy—but also pluckiness and whimsy. —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

Check out Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film, The Wages of Fear, this weekend, either here in New York at the Film Forum or on DVD. It’s kind of like Speed, but with no love story and an overlay of existentialism. Oh, and more entertaining than that implies. —S.S.