Most adults don’t have much use for physicians under the impression that dispensing the occasional lollipop is vital to keeping the patient cooperative. Even before The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think (St. Martin’s Press, $27) has properly gotten under way, author Ruy Teixeira doesn’t do himself any favors on that score. A dedication whose raised-fist summons to solidarity would have been at home on a 1930s Popular Front banner—“For the broad left and the struggle for a better future”—is followed by this kindergarten postscript: “Oh, and by the way, cheer

Although advances in science and technology are often portrayed as the work of solitary men—for example, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein—science has always been a collective enterprise, dependent on many individuals who work behind the scenes.

In February, 2009, the British medical journal Brain published an article on the intersection of health and politics titled “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?” The authors were David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary, who is also a physician and neuroscientist, and Jonathan Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, who has studied the mental health of politicians. They proposed the creation of a psychiatric disorder for leaders who exhibited, among other qualities, “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular

It was not just the suddenness of his death that made it hard to realize Louis Kahn was gone. Something about the way he disappeared from the world—irregularly, mysteriously, with that strange two-day gap when nobody he knew could find him—left many people unable to take in the facts of his death.

For the California relatives, who learned about Lou’s death through a series of relayed phone calls, there was a persistent confusion about where and how he had died. Decades later, Kahn’s niece, nephew, grandnephew, and two grandnieces all thought he had suffered a heart attack on the way back from

Just when you’re about to do a proper job as critic, assessing Jeff VanderMeer’s latest and looking at his previous, considering, too, his worldwide success and the good it’s done for science fiction generally—just when you’re about to get serious, his new novel, Borne, hits you with the likes of this:

We didn’t see the intruders at first because they were seething up from the underground. . . . But soon enough from our vantage on the roof, looking down to the factory floor through a couple of loose slats, I saw who it was: more poisoned half-changed children.