From Harper's, Jonathan Franzen and James Wood: An egg in return, in three parts (and more and more on How Fiction Works). If the novels named in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die seem like a quirky list, that’s no accident: the book is keen to start an argument. Memo to book publishers: Learn from Digg, Yelp, even Gawker. William Saletan on race, genes, and the future of medicine. How racist, conspiratorial crank Jerome Corsi became the Republican attack machine's anti-Obama point man. Rootlessness, the label that sticks to stories like Barack Obama’s, is a national trait that both attracts and repels. John McWhorter on why political oratory sounds so weird. A review of April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America by Michael Eric Dyson. A review of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity by Tommie Shelby. A struggle lies ahead in hip-hop: to wrest away the gun that points at us on the cover of NWA's "Straight Outta Compton". A review of Big Black Penis: Misadventures in Race and Masculinity by Shawn Taylor. A review of A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain by Robert Darby. From Jewish Quarterly, a review of Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander; and a celebration of the anarchic freedom of Israeli graphic novels.
