Updating a Chronicle of Suffering
When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began to escalate a few months ago, the writer Richard Preston was working on a children’s fantasy novel. He dropped that...
The Last Founding Father
Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound,...
Renaissance Man or Charlatan?
The book is ostensibly a call for revolution, even if it doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete political actions Brand would endorse or execute himself....
Biting the Invisible Hand
If you go to a bookstore, you’ll find an abundance of books deploring the very nature of capitalism. Hence, it’s a pleasure to find one author who will buck...
The Reinvention of Sex
The story of four “brave, rebellious misfits,” “The Birth of the Pill” brims with fascinating detail, such as the forgotten fact that Prescott Bush—father and...
Can Capitalism Survive?
Benjamin A. Rogge—late Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at Wabash College—was a representative of that most unusual species: economists who...
The Arc of Western Political Liberty
Characterizing the work and the significance of John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton (1834-1902), continues to be a complex project ( see, for example, John...
Winning with Adam Smith
EconTalk host Russ Roberts is interviewed by long-time EconTalk guest Michael Munger about Russ's new book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to...
The First Amendment and the Social Order
The next Liberty Law Talk is with Paul Horwitz on his new book, First Amendment Institutions. Horwitz challenges the dominant legal perspective on free speech in ...
A Man in Full
That diary is a principal reason why Fred Kaplan’s biography is so big, thorough, and so rich in quotes from the most primary of sources. Since the rest of the...
Bliss in That Dawn to Be Alive
With the strain of romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, Isaacson equates the postwar era with Wordsworth’s description of...
New Old-Fashioned Grammar
Surprisingly, British people have been snapping up copies of a book that heaps scorn on the education most of them received.
Pictures of Space Through Time
Graphic images need not be mere illustrations of concepts described in texts or equations; they can be an important form of knowledge in their own right.
'The Bell Curve' Turns 20
This month marks two decades since the publication of The Bell Curve, the massive--and massively controversial--ode to intelligence testing from Harvard psychology...
Gummit Don't Work Good
Gummit don’t work good. That conclusion, often that inelegantly expressed, seems to be more and more common, not only in the United States but around the world. It is...
Leon Panetta Blows the Whistle
In clear and unequivocal terms, former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta confirms precisely what conservative critics, lawmakers, former officials,...
Enough with Dystopias
Stephenson called for a wave of technological optimism in science fiction. Hieroglyph is meant to be the flagship for this new direction for SF.
How (and How Not) to Apologize
Public apologies are like currencies: The more they’re issued, the less they’re worth. Nearly every day, another famous offender expresses the deepest of regret for...
New York Literally Invented Nightlife
Nightlife—the nightlife that Americans know now, with dark restaurants and dance floors—did not exist until the 1920s. It's not that people didn't go out at...
It's All for Your Own Good
I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated,...
Why We Hate Politics
Why have millions of Americans turned their backs on civic affairs, trashed elected officials and come to distrust the federal government? Jonathan Darman fingers Lyndon...
Steven Pinker on Style
Pinker certainly has the tools needed to summarize what we know about good writing today: He's been studying how the brain processes language for decades, and he's a...
The Internet Is a Brutal Place
There sometimes seems to be a river of hate on the internet, flowing steadily through different social media; people are often hurt, and there is no obvious end to it....
Lena Dunham Has Become a Walking Caricature
It’s impossible to review Lena Dunham’s book without reviewing Lena Dunham. Or at least, “Lena Dunham”, the strange, confected, caricatured,...
