From TED, Liz Coleman on a call to reinvent liberal arts education. Preparing for doomsday: It's an important nut to crack — and part of the solution is a vast library of seeds. The Apocalypse is always now: The introduction to Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith. More on Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford and Orlanda Ruthven. How will Prosperity Gospel ride out the hard economic times? Eric Banks reviews The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini (and more from Bookforum). The Book-Club Hustlers: Enterprising fiction writers are marketing themselves to book groups in person, by phone, and over Skype to boost sales — meet the new breed of literary types on the make. A review of Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right. A review of Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples by Mark Dowie. A review of Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking ­Shows by Kathleen Collins. Mills and minarets: The proving grounds for the government's policy to prevent home-grown Jihad are the industrial towns of the North. iPorn: Come on Apple, give us our porn!

A new issue of Economic Sociology is out. Steven Stoll, author of The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, on economic growth as a delusion. Wise up, cheaters: With romantic email, you're writing for publication, whether you know it or not. A review of Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths by Helen Hackett. The art of the past century was radically different from earlier art, a direct result of a basic change in the structure of the market for advanced art that occurred during the late nineteenth century. What can humanist parents use in the battle against religious indoctrination? Danny Postel investigates. The new rules: An article on redefining catastrophe in a globalized world. A look at how global catastrophe could make us smarter. In the aftermath of modern U.S. disasters, science is tasked with coming up with unbiased data and irrefutable analysis; if only life were that simple, especially when it all goes to court. A review of What's the Worst That Could Happen? A rational response to the climate change debate by Greg Craven. 800 million years ago, a dramatic climatic lurch may have left our planet entombed in ice, but this snowball Earth could also have been the catalyst for complex life.

From Words Without Borders, a special issue on memory and lies. Once around the island: Gay Talese says that in all his years as a writer, he never proposed a story that would bring him near the water. A review of Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner (and more from Bookforum). Can The New York Observer owner Jared Kushner carry the ambition for himself and his disgraced father? As the dreaded R-word — rationing — once again worms its way into our debate on health care reform, it may be helpful to relearn what is taught about rationing in freshman economics. Code Red: Phillip Longman on how software companies could screw up Obama's health care reform. Health care's true price: The real reason we need a public option in health-care reform isn't cost control — it's security. Cold War without end: America never had a post-communist revolution. The invisible hand, trumped by Darwin: Growing evidence suggests that Darwin’s view of the competitive struggle tracks economic reality much more closely. Research shows that "invisible hand" guides evolution of cooperative turn-taking. That was awesome: What stuntmen think are the best stunt films of all time. Can Obama catch Osama? As the U.S. pushes hard into Afghanistan, the spotlight is back on world's most wanted.

From The Global Spiral, Adam Cohen and Kathryn Johnson (ASU): Religion, Culture, and the Personification of Non-Human Entities; Nicola Hoggard Creegan (Laidlaw): God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World. From The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews The Evolution of Obesity by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin and The Fattening of America by Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman; John Colapinto on Senator Franken’s long journey; and back in 1776, the signers of the Philadelphia declaration pledged, among other things, their fortunes — the Wasilla rebel stands to make one (and more from New York). The next conservative thinkers: Many Republicans fret that the party of ideas has gotten stuck; here are four who might help unstick it. Steve Pearlstein on how the productivity revolution has trickled into government. Evolution, the Bible, and the Book of Nature: An interview with Francis Collins. Are Democrats ready to fight for consumer protection? Blame it on the boogie: When disco fever hit academia. With the "Forbes Fictional 15", fiction's caricatures are elevated to the status of real people. Can men really make a living selling sex? Newspapers have declared free content the enemy — but who are the allies? Cass Sunstein: "To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with".