In the aftermath of the most deadly mass shooting in American history, the issue of gun regulation is once again in the news. Gun-rights advocates continue to invoke the Second Amendment as an obstacle to common-sense gun regulations. Supporters of gun-violence prevention dispute the advocates’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. Some have even suggested repealing or rewriting this much-invoked but poorly understood part of America’s constitutional heritage. It is important to reaffirm a simple fact: The Second Amendment does not belong to gun owners alone but to all Americans. Nor does the Second Amendment pose a barrier to robust gun

The title of Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free is ultimately more interesting than the case that gets made inside its pages. Early open-source-data activists used to say that software should be both “free as in beer and free as in speech.” Witt sticks mostly to the first meaning—i.e., gratis—in his account of the process by which online file sharing since the late ’90s has toppled the once enormously profitable proprietary model of the music industry.

Roberto Saviano is possibly the world’s bravest journalist. In his 2006 book, Gomorrah, he defied the omertà that had prevented anyone from telling the truth about the Mafia’s control over his native Naples for a century. Since then, Italy’s organized-crime syndicates have put out multiple contracts on his life. They have a record of killing anyone who exposes their inner workings, including judges.

David K. Shipler has enjoyed an extraordinarily distinguished career as a journalist. His long service as an overseas reporter for the New York Times afforded him extended stays in the former Soviet Union and Israel. He’s written two prizewinning books, one on the penultimate period of Soviet history, the other on relations between Jews and Arabs in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Since his retirement from the Times in 1988, Shipler has increasingly turned his attention to domestic ills (though his blog still covers foreign affairs). He now writes mainly on race relations, poverty, and the state of

The dirty secret of all American religion is its novelty. The sanctums of American faith resemble less a solemn pantheon of immutable divinity than a cluttered tinkerer’s workshop, with spare parts from one tradition carelessly soldered onto another, hastily scrawled blueprints on the whiteboard, and false starts and failed prototypes strewn throughout the works.

What is money? Most economists wrestling with this question will invoke the classical definition: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Kabir Sehgal wouldn’t disagree. But he’s also eager for people to move beyond such a narrow definition and consider the deeper meanings of money. Sehgal, a vice president at JPMorgan, is obviously no stranger to the stuff. But in Coined, he’s less interested in accumulating money than in reveling in its mysteries, its curious status throughout history, and its central place in the human imagination. In this highly readable book, he offers an enthusiastic romp through

Imagine a delegation of chiefs from the Six Nations of the Iroquois passing through the rural town of Palmyra, New York, in the early 1800s. Among them is Red Jacket, the nephew of the most famous Iroquois prophet, Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake and his followers preached sobriety, conversed with spirits, and implored their beleaguered people to return to Iroquois traditions like the longhouse. Handsome Lake’s visions involved hidden scriptures that described the religious origins of the conflict between his people and whites and included a figure similar to Jesus. Quaker missionaries had lived among his tribe.

Transparency is now such a venerated public good in America you’d suspect that—like the Grand Canyon and three-card monte—it has always been with us. But no, writes Michael Schudson in his learned history The Rise of the Right to Know. Transparency, it turns out, is only about as old as rock ’n’ roll (though, as is the case with rock ’n’ roll, its champions can point to historical precursors that gave it its form). Given this hint, you might then guess that transparency—and its bureaucratic manifestation, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—was conjured into being by the civil-rights movement or