This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self . . . about the kinds of things I wish someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college. I was like so many kids today. . . . I went off to college like a sleepwalker, like a zombie. College was a blank.” That’s how William Deresiewicz begins his blistering, arm-waving jeremiad against Ivy League colleges and their dozens of emulators, which are creating a caste that is ruining itself and society.

Ordinary words can undergo strange transformations when they are used in politics. Outside of its economic context, the word austerity connotes something stern, bleak, undecorated, pared back to its elements. But the whole concept of cutting government programs during a recession—in other words, precisely when people may need them the most—seems not just strict but […]

One of my favorite moments in Cubed, Nikil Saval’s lush, funny, and unexpectedly fascinating history of the workplace, comes in a chapter called “The Birth of the Office,” in which the author describes the insane yet rampant “efficiency” craze that began to sweep the nation in 1900. One of its outgrowths was a periodical called System, subtitled A Monthly Magazine for the Man of Affairs. “Each volume,” Saval writes, “had articles proposing new models for the minutiae of office life, whether a new system of filing or a more efficient mode of envelope licking.” (In 1929, the magazine changed to

President Barack Obama meets with (from left) Representative Barney Frank and Senators Dick Durbin and Chris Dodd in the White House Green Room, June 17, 2009. It’s hard to know what to make of the 111th Congress. On one hand, it was a Congress of immense productivity. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, for example, […]

Caricaturist Charles Philipon’s sketch of King Louis-Philippe as a pear, 1831. Most people who worked at The Nation in 1984 would probably not have disagreed with the proposition that Henry Kissinger had, metaphorically, screwed the entire world. But when then-editor Victor Navasky wanted to run a cartoon depicting him doing just that, he faced a […]

Napalm bombs explode during a live-fire exercise, 1984. “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning.” The bomber crews that dropped napalm on Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, “gagged and vomited” in the sky over the burning city. The paint on the bottoms of their planes blistered from the heat. On […]

Adolf Hitler with jackdaw, Obersalzberg, Germany, n.d. The last sixty years have witnessed a steady stream of critiques targeting intellectuals for supplying rationales—on either a direct or indirect basis—for the brutal totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Even as the specter of overt totalitarian rule has faded, European intellectuals have continued to trade charges […]