Lately, there have been signs that despite the hand-wringing and predictions to the contrary (my own included), the digital revolution has stalled. No matter how cool the latest app is, the human body wants what it wants. The Internet of Things will soon be upon us for real, but the purely tactile world, filled with pleasing idiosyncrasies and bound together by individual rituals rather than data, is still the one we live in. You can buy a “smart” frying pan with real-time temperature feedback to help you cook, but no one’s actually clamoring for a Jetsons-style setup that will make

In his diary, the teenaged Thomas De Quincey once speculated about his persona. “What shall be my character?” he wrote. “Wild—impetuous—splendidly sublime? Dignified—melancholy—gloomily sublime? Or shrouded in mystery—supernatural—like the ‘ancient mariner’—awfully sublime.” De Quincey’s reputation would turn on option number three, although he never gave up on the other alternatives. What is striking about his adolescent query is its suggestion that the author already had a strong sense of where his future might lead. In the same diary, he ingenuously presaged the dreamy, inward focus on the haunted self that years later would make Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Since we live in an era of compulsory self-disclosure, there’s no way I can avoid confessing that I read Kristin Dombek’s short book, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, in a frenzy of narcissistic injury. The reason is that for the past several years I myself have been working fitfully on a short book about contemporary narcissism (maybe I should say had been working on), except that I kept writing myself into corners and putting it aside. Still, in my own mind I owned the subject, or at least I owned the book-length essay on

There’s a scene in Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, the wayward Marxist academic of the family, prepares to bring his cherished book collection to the Strand Book Store for resale. The putative aim is to recoup what little money he can from the piles of books, among them the core writings of the Frankfurt School, which otherwise no longer hold any value for him. “He turned away from their reproachful spines,” writes Franzen, describing Chip’s bitter decision to part with the words of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and company, “remembering how each one of

Few US presidents have done enough of any significance once they were out of office to rate books devoted to their post–White House careers. Nixon had Monica Crowley to play Boswell-that-ends-well, Jimmy Carter’s life and good works after 1981 will certainly deserve a fat tome or two, and I’d buy art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s (a guy can dream) George W. Bush: The Painter of Modern Life in an eyeblink. As usual, though, Bill Clinton is sui generis, comparable only to Teddy Roosevelt in his outsize presence and ongoing political impact sixteen years after his presidency. Hence Joe Conason’s nicely titled