I know all about traffic. So do you. So does everyone. We curse it. We try to avoid it. When we’re pedestrians, we try not to be run down by it. Of course, we also cause it. And as we sit stuck in it, we sometimes develop one or two pet theories about it, generally based on nothing more than conjecture and personal prejudice. To that extent, Tom Vanderbilt is one of us. In the prologue to Traffic, he wonders whether those who merge lanes at the last possible moment are arrogant queue jumpers or simply making the best use of available space. It’s a good question, and Vanderbilt doesn’t come up

It’s easy to guess why a collection of writings by Ulrike Meinhof is just now being published in English: Understanding terrorists is a newly thriving field of scholarship, and the left-wing, European extremists in the Red Army Faction make a nice control group for an all-Islamist-all-the-time sample set. How did Meinhof go from upstanding citizen to anticapitalist bomber, from mother to monster? By 1972, when the fugitive Meinhof was finally captured, the RAF had been linked to dozens of bank robberies and bombings, along with the murders of several policemen, and Meinhof was sent to prison,

This probably isn’t a good time to fall in love with the English. Their economy—subject to an even more inflated property market than ours—is poised for a fall. Their boozy, clever, and always-for-hire Hitchens-style newspaper hacks are starting to wear thin. And with just about the worst diet in the EU and an unquenchable thirst for our trashiest cultural exports (from Bret Easton Ellis to Desperate Housewives), it’s not always easy telling them apart from, well, us.

It’s a land where surface has always mattered most, and as Sarah Lyall points out in The Anglo Files, her amusing, perceptive,

When asked why she had decided to give red hair to her famous heroine, Anne Shirley (better known as Anne of Green Gables to legions of little girls the world over), author Maud Montgomery replied, “I didn’t. It was red.” The question of whether Anne, the passionate orphan with a temper and a penchant for puffy sleeves, really sprang fully formed from her creator’s head—Athena to Montgomery’s Zeus—is the driving force behind Irene Gammel’s new book, Looking for Anne of Green Gables, published in time for the first novel’s centenary. Gammel dismantles that legend both exhaustively and lovingly

For three years, Peter Trachtenberg traveled around the world seeking out people in anguish. He looked for those whose suffering transcended “garden-variety sorrow”: Sri Lankan children orphaned by the tsunami; twin girls with a rare genetic disease that made their skin continually blister; Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub. With The Book of Calamities, he attempts to categorize and comprehend their suffering, which he defines as the “experience of chaos,” a “staticky primal layer of experience that is beyond the reach of language.”

Trachtenberg is

The borders of NATO member nations were once hair triggers for nuclear war with the Soviets. But in the post-cold-war era, NATO appears more like a geopolitical relic than a key piece in the apocalyptic endgame between superpowers. Still, the alliance remains a vast and powerful one, and as is always the case with things military, there exists a heroically proportioned bureaucracy. Artist Suzanne Treister makes canny use of one of its elements, the classification system of NATO’s Maintenance and Supply Agency, for her watercolors. The agency has a designated code for an entire world of military