It’s no coincidence that growing alarm over America’s decreasing global influence corresponds with a growing hysteria over our child-rearing practices. Believing that “the children are our future,” as Whitney Houston so helpfully put it, is not all that different from believing in, say, stock futures. The monitors of stock and early-developmental portfolios certainly face the same basic question: How big a chunk are you willing to lop off your bank account, your sanity, and your soul in order to ensure that the future looks half as shiny and promising as you expect it to?

Parenting

THE COVER OF TARYN SIMON’S newly reprinted 2008 monograph, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is unlikely to catch any casual viewer’s eye. Bound in nondescript gray cloth, with its title inscribed in gold lettering over a black background, the book looks like a volume of an encyclopedia or a legal periodical. But inside you’ll find something far less anodyne: a mesmerizing, carefully composed series of photographs whose subjects range from decomposing corpses and quarantined parrots to NASA guesthouses and control rooms of nuclear submarines.

Simon’s America is one of ordinarily

In 1942, the literary quarterly Accent accepted James Farl Powers’s short story “He Don’t Plant Cotton,” his first published fiction. Powers was working then for a wholesale book company in Chicago, having dropped out of Northwestern because he couldn’t afford tuition. He wrote his editor that he hoped to quit his job, to “get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write.”

By the time Accent published his second story—the classic “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” an astonishing achievement for a twenty-five-year-old author—Powers was behind bars. Having fallen in with a group of Catholic pacifists, he

In 1952, six years after publishing its first book, Farrar, Straus & Company nearly failed. Founded by Guggenheim heir Roger Straus with $360,000 from his family and friends’ interests in department stores, mining, and brewing (the former Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn served as the warehouse for its books), the firm had printed one hundred thousand copies of Mr. President, a quasi-official selection of President Truman’s papers and photographs. As Truman’s reelection campaign began, the book looked to be a hit, but a couple weeks after its publication, Truman reversed course and announced he

Back in 2009, the New Museum organized a show of the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, curated not by the museum’s staff but by Jeff Koons—the superstar artist who, as it so happens, features prominently in the tycoon’s holdings. The conflict of interest didn’t end there: Koons had designed Joannou’s thirty-five-meter yacht and was even the best man at Joannou’s wedding. Among those upset by this somewhat unusual—but also somehow emblematic—arrangement was William Powhida. Then a lesser-known artist, Powhida detailed the whole back-scratchy affair in a drawing