So what kind of book will emerge from the 2016 presidential campaign? For more than a year now, I’ve been saying a secular metaphysical cleric from deep in South America—Borges, say, or Julio Cortázar—should compose it. I recognize that they’re both “with the ancestors.” But would a Book of, or by, the Dead about Campaign 2016, complete with mix-and-match chapters and faux arcana, be any less opaque to real life than Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who exists in his own alternate universe, where feelings are facts and facts always lie?

Circa August 1993, in a museum in the Netherlands, I had what Adam, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, skeptically calls “a profound experience of art,” something riveting and unselfconscious. (Adam has only experienced the absence of a profound experience of art, and he doesn’t believe that anyone else he knows has really been “changed” by a poem or song, either.) I was eight years old, intensely serious, receiving steady doses of cold medication and family Holocaust lore during my first trip out of the US. In a museum gift shop, I spied a print of a

Intrigue abounds in Missing Man, New York Times reporter Barry Meier’s account of the bizarre case of Robert Levinson, a sometime CIA contractor stranded in Iran without any official American recognition of his true whereabouts—or any pending hope of a Stateside return. But the convoluted espionage surrounding Levinson is puzzling on another level as well: It exposes the storied workings of global spycraft as run by a largely improvised, and oddly random, ensemble of bit players, striving to project some larger meaning onto what are, at bottom, all-too-mundane transactions. In this saga, figures like Robert Levinson are morally ambiguous and

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

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

They say there are two kinds of writers. First, the A-line writers: the sort with magnificent prose, literary and rich, whose style is more engaging than their ideas. These people are a pleasure to read just for the sake of reading. Then, the B-line writers: Their ideas outweigh their sturdy but unremarkable writing. They are not stylists but thinkers, polemicists, detail hounds. People read their work for the thoroughness of thought. There is, of course, the minuscule array of writers who encompass both groups, but they are rare and very wealthy.

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