George McGovern, the United States senator who won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who was then trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

Recent news from the department of feminist provocateurs, Russian division:

The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store. She had realized that she didn’t have the money to finish her legal training, and, after a year working in a geriatric hospital, that she didn’t want to be a social worker. She was bored with selling dresses; she had started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another.

Perhaps the most confounding thing about this uneven novel is its prominent blurb from David Foster Wallace, who calls the book “a bold, funny, mordant, and deeply intelligent debut.” This might not be worth bringing up if That’s Not a Feeling wasn’t so clearly an attempted foray into Infinite Jest territory. Both novels are concerned, at least partially, with the tangled inner lives of young people; and both are interested in the ideas surrounding therapy, the misguided ideologies of institutions, and what it means to be unwell and to get better. Yet while Wallace wrote a book about a tennis

To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert

Three of Coralie Bickford-Smith’s cover designs for the Penguin Great Food series. After spending some weeks luxuriating in the gorgeous presence of Penguin’s Great Food series—a collection of reprints that includes the genre’s classic titles from the past four hundred years—I have many questions. Would I ever actually make lambs’ ears with sorrel or fricassee […]

A July blog post at Washingtonian magazine dissected what it calls the “Washington Read”—the process “by which, through a form of intellectual osmosis, a book is absorbed into the Washington atmosphere.” The central irony here is that a best-selling book that becomes a Washington Read—typically after some Sunday-morning talking head raves about its insights and brilliance or the Post runs a prominent review—doesn’t yield many actual Washington readers. Rather, busy and self-important DC residents elect simply to buy a copy and skim the table of contents and introduction (as well as the index, to see if they’re mentioned) so they

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.