The word crusade has coursed through American political debate from the beginning, with all manner of leaders—Thomas Jefferson to William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown to Wendell Willkie and FDR, Dwight Eisenhower to John McCain—adopting it as a de facto slogan. And it seems that each time a political figure characterizes a new reform as a crusade, the word’s meaning grows more tepid, more distorted, and more palatable, suggesting only an intense campaign rooted in moral righteousness. Perhaps this common usage is what sparked George W. Bush’s terrible gaffe on September 16, 2001, only five days after 9/11, when he proclaimed

We Americans love our icons of individuality—Henry David Thoreau, the Lone Ranger, Carrie Bradshaw—almost as much as we wish all the single people would just settle down and get married. As sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in Going Solo, “Americans have never fully embraced individualism, and we remain deeply skeptical of its excesses.” Nevertheless, we’d better start getting OK with it—because, as Klinenberg shows, this country is getting more single by the minute. The facts are astonishing. “The majority of all American adults are single,” he writes. “The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than

Like Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis has made his career reporting on outliers. Lewis has delivered bracing accounts of investment bankers whose doomsday predictions went ignored until they came to pass, of teenagers who harnessed the power of Internet message boards to undermine the stock market, and of low-budget baseball teams that used unorthodox statistics to compete with richer clubs.

In a letter to his lover, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller wrote that he was possibly the only writer in our time who has had the chance to write only as he pleased. This kind of hyperbole marked his audacious, pornographic monologue of a first novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was published in the US fifty years ago (after the Supreme Court overturned a quarter-century ban). Now, in Renegade, scholar Frederick Turner reassesses the work, making the case that the book and its author are as quintessentially American as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Turner’s volume is part of Yale University

Mural of Cesar Chavez at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Academic Middle School, San Francisco, 2010. We have grown so accustomed to seeing the American labor movement in a state of decline—and coming under constant attack—that it is easy to dismiss the whole subject as a romanticized legacy of an aging progressive Left. I was […]

“Isaiah prophesied, ‘And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of man shall be made low.’ That prediction bore truth in my lifetime and on my watch.”

Andrei Rublev, Apostle Paul, ca. 1410. When the center cannot hold, public attention turns to the passionate intensity of those who are destroying it or amusing themselves with its destruction. But what becomes of the public itself in this process—and of citizens’ dignity and prospects? Aristotle considered humans beastly without the sphere of “the political,” […]

Back in 1980, I persuaded the Washington Post Book World, where I was then working as an assistant editor, to launch a monthly column devoted to science fiction and fantasy. For once my timing was just right. During the 1980s, Gene Wolfe produced the four original novels of The Book of the New Sun. John Crowley brought out Little, Big and the first volume of the Ægypt series. Writers with roots in science fiction—J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ursula K. Le Guin—broke into mainstream consciousness, while mainstream literary figures such as Margaret Atwood and Russell Hoban produced dystopian visions of

Édouard Vuillard, Lucy Hessel, Marcelle Reiss, and Pierre Aron at Vasouy, 1904, gelatin silver print, 3 1/2 x 3 1/2″. In her introduction to this volume, curator and author Elizabeth Easton argues that the invention and early use of amateur cameras is relevant to the twenty-first century because the technological changes experienced by people using […]

Hans Keilson’s story is one worth telling and retelling. The German-born doctor and writer’s years hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands, his membership with the Dutch resistance during the Second World War, and his groundbreaking work as a psychotherapist dealing with the treatment of trauma in Jewish children after the war are all fascinating topics—all the more so when you realize that he did these things in the first half of his 101-year life (he died in 2011). And somehow, during all of this, he found time to write books. In 2010, FSG released two of Keilson’s novels, 1959’s