Indoctrination into the practices of modern motherhood can feel like showing up at Navy SEAL training camp without any discernible desire to, say, swim several miles through strong ocean waves fully clothed, and then proceed to trudge through the sand for fifteen miles in wet boots. Even with hormonally induced romantic notions about bonding with this small, as-yet-unseen human, it can be tough not to feel wishy-washy among the hard-core marines of motherhood. The current ideal seems to call for a total surrender to the baby’s putative desires—natural childbirth, home birthing, on-demand

Along with global warming and the environment, food has become one of the foremost political issues in America, especially among educated, well-heeled liberals. The emerging sensitive-foodie ethos hinges on a heightened awareness of those “starving children in Africa” whom our mothers invoked in order to make us eat our brussels sprouts—but adherents of the rawer, purer locavore gospel have lately built out the critique to include the obese, diabetic kids right here at home.

During previous decades, food was unhealthy or not, fattening or not. Now it carries the additional potential indictment

Americans who have lived abroad know that the rest of the world is mildly obsessed with the CIA. I live in Istanbul, and early on I learned that many Turks believe CIA agents can pull off everything from September 11 to the election of Islamists; what’s more, they suspect I might be a spy, too. In this view of the world, some foreign influence is always responsible for something, some outside group is always “fomenting chaos” somewhere, some lethal CIA squad is always making it look like the leftists bombed the rightists by bombing the rightists themselves. At first, to this innocent and trusting

LAST SEPTEMBER, shortly before the Whitechapel Gallery mounted an exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal’s work, Phaidon’s website posted a list of songs the Polish artist listens to while painting. Many of the tracks are ominously monotone, uniform in mood, sound, or structure—there’s no resolution, no cure for what ails. Even Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” second on Sasnal’s list, omits Rodgers and Hart’s final verse, in which a lover appears and the blue moon turns gold; instead, the song remains steadfastly lovelorn.

So does “Hollow Hills,” the Bauhaus track that inspired Sasnal to become an artist. He’d copy

The conservative canonization of Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of the tax cut has always been a vexed rite. For one thing, Reagan actually raised taxes in 1982, when the country was sunk in a grim recession and the president’s economic advisers were sounding alarms over the gaping hole created in the federal budget by his 1981 package of tax cuts.