A lot to take in here.

• Prepositions matter. If you’re standing on the corner, you could be having the time of your life; if you’re standing in the corner, you’re probably not having much fun at all. The corner of a room is a site of inwardness and anxiety, a repository for social insecurities. It’s also just not very exciting to look at. For these reasons and more, as Will Wiles writes in a ranging new essay, writers as various as H. P. Lovecraft and J. G. Ballard are united in their fixation on corners, the locus of so many psychic burdens: “Lovecraft and Ballard both put architecture at the heart of their fiction, even though neither had the slightest formal training in the subject … They are connected, through time and space, by that most humble of architectural events: the corner, the junction between two walls. What Lovecraft and Ballard did was to make the corner into a place of nightmares—and in doing so, they reveal its secret history … The Lovecraftian corner could drive men mad, whisk them to terrible other places, and sometimes kill them outright. And the corner of a room is a place of power—uncanny, unwelcome power. ‘That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to be examined,’ writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Bachelard saw the corner as a shameful intellectual bolthole, in which we are silent and immobile, negating the universe, constructing imaginary rooms around us … In 1967 Ballard made four conceptual advertisements and placed them in the pages of the literary magazine Ambit. One asked: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ ”

• JFK talked a big game about art—“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist,” he said, and he seemed to believe that nurturing U.S. artists was a great way to kick Commie ass. But now that the dust has settled, Philip Kennicott writes, we should be honest—the guy didn’t really like art that much: “Kennedy was never an art lover, and to the extent that he respected art, it was in the same way he respected accomplishment in science and sports. Nor was Kennedy moved by music or opera, or susceptible to the introspection offered by paintings or sculpture. He was, however, passionate about winning the Cold War on all fronts, including culture … Kennedy no doubt believed everything he said about art, at least in an abstract way. But notice the words that got cut … ‘Art reminds us that man’s hunger for beauty, and truth and self-fulfillment, knows no national boundaries.’ That cut, eliminating reference to how individuals actually engage with art—the hunger for deeper things and self-fulfillment—is significant … He was mocked even in his own time for being more an enthusiast than a deep connoisseur. In 1965, the Kenyon Review wrote that one of his most engaging statements on the arts, an article he wrote for Look Magazine, was written ‘in a vein better suited to a high school commencement address.’ ”

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