Jack Shafer
Transparency is now such a venerated public good in America you’d suspect that—like the Grand Canyon and three-card monte—it has always been with us. But no, writes Michael Schudson in his learned history The Rise of the Right to Know. Transparency, it turns out, is only about as old as rock ’n’ roll (though, as is the case with rock ’n’ roll, its champions can point to historical precursors that gave it its form). Given this hint, you might then guess that transparency—and its bureaucratic manifestation, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—was conjured into being by the civil-rights movement or 
What do you call a revival that never ends? Over the past two decades, publishers have added three biographies of H. L. Mencken—Mencken: A Life by Fred Hobson, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken by Terry Teachout, and Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers—to the three or four that had already been released. Over that same period, Mencken, who died in 1956 at the age of seventy-five, has been more prolific than many living authors. We’ve seen the release of a volume of memoirs (My Life as Author and Editor), a journal Mencken kept between 1930