Economic crises get the jeremiads they deserve. More than a hundred years ago, with the labor uprisings of the Lower East Side as a backdrop, Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives; the 1930s saw an outpouring of writing chronicling the Depression as a betrayal of American promise; in the early 1960s, Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, an impassioned exposé of poverty in the midst of abundance. Just a few years earlier, John Kenneth Galbraith had deplored the inane commercialism of 1950s America in The Affluent Society. And in the early aughts, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and

Anand Giridharadas’s The True American operates on the seemingly provocative question of who is more American: the Bangladeshi air-force officer who immigrates to Dallas, hires on as a gas-station cashier, and dreams of working with computers; or the Bud-swilling, tatted, truck-driving, meth-blasted Texas peckerwood who shot him as “revenge” for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Which man more encapsulates the true core of American ideals? And, really, what are America’s post-9/11 ideals? Is our place in the pecking order of social status in this country somehow mystically predetermined, or do we

As much as libertarians and liberals may now be at odds, they endorse the same foundational value. It’s right there in their names: Both political philosophies share the Latin root liber, or “free.” Liberty is a special sort of good that the two poles of American politics, and pretty much every position in between, embrace as fundamental.

What, then, to do about the many conflicts and contradictions that have flowed, with increasing rancor on all sides, from this core commitment to freedom? In Philip Pettit’s judgment, we should rehabilitate a neglected vital tributary of political philosophy:

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp was a magpie doubling as a prophet. He dabbled in Dada, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism, all to great effect. His work prefigured postmodernism and deconstruction, Pop and conceptual art, and he undertook what can be seen as the longest ever piece of performance art by pretending for decades to have quit art-making to play chess (he was playing chess, but he was also secretly making art).

Last Wednesday, New Yorker staff writer Calvin Tomkins appeared at the New York Public Library to discuss his definitive

It is the unfortunate fate of many women of a certain period to be recalled not as individuals but as “flappers,” a word that seems, to modern chroniclers, a nearly irresistible invitation to a morality tale. A woman of the 1920s might refuse domesticity without consequence; a flapper, on the other hand, will burn brightly for a time before descending into the kind of callow, knowing narcissism that completes a particular narrative arc. We know many of these stories by heart: Zelda Fitzgerald fell into madness, and Tamara de Lempicka into obscurity. Tallulah Bankhead was a drunk, Josephine