St. Vincent’s Art Pop & Meditating on Middlemarch

The powerhouse guitarist Annie Clark, also known as St. Vincent, calls her music a cross between pop and “lunatic fringe.” She tells Kurt Andersen how David Byrne and metal heroes Pantera inspired her new album. The author Rebecca Mead makes the case for George Eliot’s Middlemarch as the greatest novel of all time — all 900 pages of it. Plus, Olympic skaters in Sochi get high marks for their triple axels, but if we have to hear one more instrumental rock medley…