Lawn-mower haircuts and J. C. Penney polos are to Glenn O’Brien what Haiti is to Sean Penn. They provoke in him a kind of heroic passion that makes him want to save untold thousands from fashion disaster, or at least from the creeping sadness of the Gap.

O’Brien has been a downtown Zelig for more years than he’s willing to reveal: one of Warhol’s Factory workers, an editor and art director of Interview magazine, host of the pre-MTV public-access new-wave show TV Party, creative director at Barney’s. Now he’s GQ’s Style Guy columnist and a freelance something-or-other to the fabulous. Husband,

No sooner had essays and novels emerged as popular literary forms in seventeenth-century Europe than readers came to seek in them the kinds of spiritual and practical guidance they had always found in more overtly philosophical works like Ecclesiastes and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson was certainly aware of this when he extracted what he called “moral and instructive sentiments, maxims, cautions, and reflexions” from his own novels and published them as a separate volume. The desire to distill wisdom from literature is still with us, albeit

Quite often, religion proves every bit as stupid as it is crucial. Which is to say that the sheer preposterousness of a religion—any religion—can serve as a measure of spiritual need. The longing for cosmological certainty is so great that humanity is susceptible to all kinds of bunkum. The sad truth: Our most fundamental trait is foolishness.

Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology grew out of a National Magazine Award–nominated piece for Rolling Stone, and there are two reasons you might consider reading it. One, per the above rule of cracked religiosity, you might hope for an explanation of why

It’s always good to revisit the cold war to remind yourself that, despite an orgy of supporting evidence, you’re not living through the most fucked-up period in American history. As J. Hoberman’s factually dense, swiftly narrated history of Hollywood’s symbiosis with the atomic-age body politic makes clear, the cold war was, pace our current moment, the third great battle over the nation’s identity and purpose, trailing only the Revolutionary and Civil Wars in significance.

An Army of Phantoms is, like the second Star Wars trilogy, a prequel, in this case to Hoberman’s 2003 The Dream Life:

Jon Ronson is fascinated by people who are bonkers. And insane people who appear to be normal, and ostensibly sane people doing crazy things. The British journalist's book The Men Who Stare at Goats — about a secret U.S. military wing that hoped to use mind power to walk through walls, become invisible and perform psychic executions — was the basis for the 2009 film of the same title.

Now, Ronson's paddling around the swampy parts of sanity again in The Psychopath Test, a book that manages to be as cheerily kooky as it is well-researched.

There are countless books on the history of British music in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Consider, for example, the eight hundred-odd books that Amazon currently has about the Beatles, or the numerous volumes chronicling the roots of mod, glam, punk, and post-punk. The veritable mountain of literature on David Bowie alone could take a lifetime to sift through.

In Electric Eden, Rob Young uncovers a hidden seam of British music, a fascinating tangle of stories that have not been told in great detail. This encyclopedic tome, which weighs in at over 600 pages, grapples with the unwieldy history of

Last Wednesday night Stephen Colbert took on Comedy Central's parent company Viacom, calling out their lawyers for trying to block his attempts to form a political action committee for the 2012 election. For the second time this year, he has publicly defied his corporate masters on air to try to keep his campaign going.

By promoting his Colbert Super PAC on the Colbert Report against Viacom's wishes, Colbert is crossing the comedy line yet again. He is using his cable news persona's megalomania to bring exposure to some brand new and potentially devastating realities in campaign financing,