There are only two truly revealing sentences in Zev Chafets’s new biography of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News and message minder for a host of Republican presidents. They serve as bookends of sorts. The first, in the preface, informs us that the project at hand will be superannuated: “He intends to write an autobiography someday, and I imagine he is holding something in reserve.” The second appears 249 pages later, in the acknowledgments: “I am indebted to Brian Lewis, Fox News executive vice president for corporate communications, who was always willing to answer just one more question.”

“People expect too much of writers,” Albert Camus lamented in the late 1950s. At the time Camus was writing, the Algerian rebellion had grown into a full-scale guerrilla war for independence, and while his initial sympathy for the uprising led the French Right and the French Algerian settlers to denounce him as a traitor, he also came in for frequent polemical attacks from the French Left for not energetically and unequivocally supporting the insurgents. Criticism also came from the Algerian militants themselves. Frantz Fanon, the best-known Algerian writer, derided him as a “sweet sister.”

There is no such thing as “the Internet.”

That is to say: Thinking, writing, and speaking about “the Internet” as if there were such a thing as a distinct, global, open, distributed “network of networks” that can connect all of humanity as soon as we can all get “online” leads us to ignore many inconvenient facts.

In most of the world, digitized network communication is not so open, not well distributed, and not necessarily run through the sort of computer networks that serve as the foundation of “Internet” communication in the United States. When you send a message via the AT&T mobile 4G

Fifty years ago, one of the great truths that no serious person dared challenge was that humanity was just a few ticks away from the detonation of what Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich dubbed “the population bomb,” in his book of the same name. The world, everyone assumed, would be awash in (even more) hungry mouths to feed.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” intoned Ehrlich with all the certitude of a future MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient. “In the 1970s . . . hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date

The last sixty years have witnessed a steady stream of critiques targeting intellectuals for supplying rationales—on either a direct or indirect basis—for the brutal totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Even as the specter of overt totalitarian rule has faded, European intellectuals have continued to trade charges and countercharges over the perennial threat of what the French polemicist Jean-François Revel famously labeled “the totalitarian temptation.”

Writers on the American scene have shared this sense of hazard—most notably Richard Wolin and the late Tony Judt, who have