Like Horatius standing alone against Rome’s would-be invaders, Fareed Zakaria begins this portentously titled book by posing defiantly against “the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs” that makes Americans “nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications.” “The irrelevance of a liberal education . . . has achieved that rare status in Washington: bipartisan agreement,” he warns. Those making the liberal arts more job-focused and technical are “abandoning what has been historically distinctive, even unique, in the American approach to higher education.”

The 9/11 attacks occurred the week I had to defend my dissertation in philosophy. I took my first tenure-track job (yes, such a thing existed back then) during the launch of our now fourteen-year-old “war on terror.” As I made my way in academia in the midst of George W. Bush’s presidency, my new colleagues and I would inevitably discuss the authoritarian and distorting turn of American public discourse. How could so many be so cowed and so misled into supporting such an obvious misadventure as the Iraq war? How could our leading institutions—and especially the media—fail so miserably to

You don’t shoot yourself,” said a battered Muhammad Ali in his hotel room after losing the Fight of the Century to Joe Frazier on March 8, 1971. “Soon this will be old news. . . . Maybe a plane will go down with 90 persons in it. Or a great man will be assassinated. That will be more important than Ali losing.”

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is a slim, well-intentioned, and gratingly naive collection of essays on Women’s Issues. It could serve as a sort of primer for freshman-year dorm-room discussions of why rape is bad, why all people deserve the right to marry, how they can maintain a baseline measure of equality while they’re married, and why feminism is still a noble movement. But that’s only if you like your agitprop soft-boiled and sexless.

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.

Has there ever been a medical specialty as beleaguered as psychiatry? Since the profession’s founding in 1844, the doctors of the soul have had to contend with suspicions that they do not know what mental illness is, what type their patients might have, or what they should do about it—in other words, that they are doctors who do not practice real medicine. Some of the worry comes from the psychiatrists themselves, such as Pliny Earle, who in 1886 complained that “in the present state of our knowledge, no classification of insanity can be erected upon a pathological basis.” In 1917,

Within the American Left, there’s a growing consensus that the gains won by postwar liberalism have been squandered or otherwise lost. A famous set of graphs by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez depicts a return to pre–New Deal levels of economic inequality, and commentators have bemoaned the advent of a second Gilded Age. The American working class is squeezed tight, while a tiny ruling elite lives larger than ever. And this time, proletarian institutional counterweights—labor unions, populist political organizations—have degraded to the point that they appear unable to do anything but lose ground. The ruling class now seems to rule