From NYRB, an article on Obama and the Middle East. The Bush era might look like a dark spot in a history of American exceptionalism, but the last eight years were hardly unique. A review of Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.'s The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950. A review of The Law Into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Politics of Exceptionalism by Roxanne Lynn Doty. From TNR's The Vine, can't we just learn to live with global warming? Bradford Plumer wants to know. The Green Bubble: Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger on why environmentalism keeps imploding. Can 350.org save the world? Groups gear up to issue an emergency alert that carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere has already passed a tipping point. Uh, look, century, it’s just not working out with us: The year 2001 was nothing like the movie "2001" — we will always hold this against you. Martin Amis says his next novel will be “blindingly autobiographical”; Julie Kavanagh gets in first and writes a memoir of their life together in the 1970s. Behind the recent scandal at Oxford lies a more intractable conflict between the myths of poetry and the realities of the modern university. A panel of experts discuss the current state of the Great American Wedding. A look at why you are what your mother worried about.