The "great (colonial) American novel" was written more than half a century ago. John Barth's 1960 masterpiece, The Sot Weed Factor, keeps improving with age.

Mark Leibovich's This Town is a symptom of the same Beltway insider disease it aims to describe.

Bruce Springsteen is no mere musical entertainer, argues a new biography. The Boss is a multidimensional American cultural phenomenon—broken-soul mender, community-builder, proletarian troubadour, political preacher and marketing juggernaut all in one.

Understanding rogue or “outlier” states, and figuring out how to deal with them, remains a major international security challenge. Two books would tutor us, one more successfully than the other.

Discerning the origins and nature of consciousness is the neuro- science challenge. Does “mind” reduce to “brain”, or not? If not, can information rolling recursively back on itself explain it?

Bee Wilson’s history of the fork—and other kitchen appurtenances—shows us that we are how we eat as well as what we eat. Culinary tools have reflected cultural dispositions in surprising ways, and continue to do so to this very day.

Historian Peter Brown’s critique of Edward Gibbon also sheds light on the popular myths of American decline.

Political inequality drives economic inequality, not the other way around.

Large cities in poorly and misgoverned lands have problems dis- tinct from those in more affluent, better-institutionalized democracies. The denizens of the latter fail to appreciate what ails those of the former even as they produce “wasteful waste” of their own.

Russia’s tumultuous and mostly regrettable post-Cold War history is paralleled in some ways by an earlier time, one that provided the setting for the incomparable émigré journalist Alexander Herzen.