Sincerity, a quality we typically think of as a constant and unchanging human virtue, is anything but.

Our modern cornucopia of consumer goods is supposed to make us happier, but it doesn't. Here's why.

Scholars are fond of criticizing ideologues who ransack history for useful material to promote contemporary agendas. It turns out that many scholars do more or less the same thing.

Walker Percy distrusted the esoteric and the arcane, looking instead to the concrete and the quotidian as a bridge to faith and meaning. A man of both the American South and the Catholic Church, his novels and essays never evince a claim to know any mortal's destination—only the value of the journey.

The HBO television series The Wire, which aired between 2002 and 2008, brought Americans face-to-face with the stubborn and disturbing reality of inner-city life.

The recent release of a series of 1930s-era two-reelers reminds us how great Buster Keaton was even when he wasn't at this best. The Great Stone Face was no slapstick peddler, but a true harbinger of film comedy as an art form.

While atheists and offended believers have been holding the equivalent of a dorm room bull session over the role of religion in society, evolutionary biology has emerged as a beacon of understanding. Two recent books attempt to turn that potential into reality.

Aryeh Neier's new history of the human rights movement manages to be dull, impersonal and evasive all at the same time. But when read carefully, it shows signs that the movement's old guard is growing more uncomfortable with the unfettered idealism of the rising generation of human rights activists.

The percentage of Americans living alone has never been higher. While there is every reason to worry about the social implications of the data, Eric Klinenberg is alone and loving it—for all the wrong reasons.

We usually think of John Kenneth Galbraith as the archetypal liberal—and not without reason. But Galbraith's late 1950s understanding of the interplay between the sources of poverty and public policy remediation was far more realistic, and in every way superior, to what came after him. A look back is both enlightening and, frankly, a bit depressing, given the profound confusion we have been mired in ever since.