Ric Burns’s fascinating new documentary opens in Sacks’s Greenwich Village apartment on Feb. 9, 2015, a month after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer and not quite eight months before his death at 82.

A recent Saul Steinberg Foundation gift to the Parrish Art Museum is a collection of 49 works by the artist over four decades touching on most aspects of his creative practice.

Often a Christmas choral concert contains certain standards: the Vivaldi Gloria, the biblical narratives of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, a few nostalgic English carols, and in conclusion an “all stand” for Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. This was something different.

From Mary Gaitskill’s novelistic reconsideration of the #MeToo movement to Elton John’s hilarious self-mockery, our man in letters picks ’em . . .