From Salon, fiction is crucial to our survival as a species: A review of On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd; and cellphone novels, the rage in Japan, now have competition in America — Twitter fiction. Obama is The Boss: What Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen share is an understanding that real life happens on the ground. A review of Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst. The 13 people who made torture possible: They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it. Tzvetan Todorov on Bush’s intellectual torturers. The Rise of the Black Hipster: What happens when the hybrid hipster culture hits black America? From In These Times, an article on the Cuban Revolution and the American Left. From THES, a review of From Marxism to Post-Marxism? by Goran Therborn; an essay on FR Leavis' The Canon: The Great Tradition; and an article of Quentin Skinner, a historian renowned for examining past ideas in pursuit of disconcerting truths about the present. China Underground: An article on the Uighur Jimi Hendrix. Big Bosoms and the Big Bang: Did the human condition really emerge in Europe?