When riots convulsed working-class communities throughout Britain this summer, the predominant reflex in the English media was to lash out at the rioters as criminals, thugs, and hooligans, engaged in senseless destruction for destruction’s sake. To be sure, there was plenty of unhinged mayhem, especially once the unrest entered the looting and fire-setting phase. But to write off the uprisings—which started at the end of a peaceful Tottenham vigil in protest of the police killing of a black man named Mark Duggan—as the “mindless” conduct of individual bad actors, as the general run of commentary

“Don’t laugh.” It’s the very first paragraph, and Catherine Tumber is already worried that we won’t take her seriously. She has good reason, since the thesis of her new book is that small Rust Belt cities can help all of us turn green.

It’s a bold and hopeful thesis, but also a tough sell. After all, as Tumber notes at the outset of Small, Gritty, and Green, debates about urban issues have long been dominated by big-city people who tend to disparage or ignore the dull, diminutive towns scattered across “flyover country.” H. L. Mencken, the master of the “cosmopolitan sneer” in Tumber’s view,

Why does everyone love him so? Well, not everyone, of course. Here’s what I mean: “Today Chesterton is not among the best known of authors,” wrote the right-wing anarcho-capitalist Joseph Sobran. “But among those who do know him, he is one of the best loved.” And those who do love him are as likely to be on the left as on the right, among vegans and carnivores, bohos and ultramontanes, theocrats, agnostics, and Bible burners alike. Almost everyone.

Sobran, a gifted and prolific crank, is a case in point. From the first rank of Chestertonians we might pluck any number of prominent writers who

At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I

“Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, and, some seventy years later, the curiosity of Kipling’s case still persists. On the one hand it’s tempting and safe to pigeon-hole him as the author of The Jungle Book for children and the poem “If — ,” that corny, beautiful, Buddha-like exhortation to stoicism and self-control. On the other, there are those who, like James Joyce, choose to condemn Kipling for “semi-fanatic” ideas about patriotism and race and consider him barely worth reading. An

How do you write a biography of David Bowie? How do you pin down a grasshopper aesthete whose core belief is that the only thing worse than looking the same twice is sounding the same twice?

Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staff book editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction