As a major serving in the British military during World War II, Jon Naar witnessed a way of life reduced to rubble. In the winter of 1973, as a fifty-something photojournalist living and working in New York, Naar once again saw a devastated landscape. But here the names of the young and dispossessed—often no more than a handle and maybe a number corresponding to the street the kid lived on, like Junior 161 or Stay High 149—were being spray-painted everywhere: bus shelters, handball courts, ice-cream trucks, subway trains, bridges, even trees. This was evidence of a citywide referendum on the

What is it about the memoir that forces it, in spite of its many wonderful achievements, always to stand in the docket? Was it ever thus, or is it our age that feels especially defensive, apologetic, and guilt-ridden about the practice of the genre? We can only begin reckoning with such questions by placing the memoir in historical perspective, which is exactly what Ben Yagoda has done with his timely, useful, and informative study, Memoir: A History.

The past generation of conservative rule in America has, among other things, dislodged the once unquestioned interpretation of American history as a study in the consolidation of liberal power. The shock of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 initially struck the keepers of the meliorative liberal “consensus” view of our political past as a momentary aberration—half backlash and half tantrum. Liberal scholars argued that Reagan and his backers were engaged in a massive exercise in magical thinking, seeking to blot out the fractious political controversies of ’60s liberalism with an unstable compound of supply-side dogma and family-values nostalgia. It was a

When Donald Trump—I know, I know, but stay with me here—began his ascent in the Republican presidential-primary field this past summer, political journalists all started wrestling with variations on the same burning question: Just who were these people telling pollsters they would grant this coiffed real-estate scion access to the White House?

In 1992, the American Economic Review published a “Plea for a Pluralistic and Rigorous Economics,” signed by a number of eminent economists, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Kindleberger, Paul A. Samuelson, Robert Heilbroner, and Hyman Minsky. One of the organizers of the manifesto was Geoffrey M. Hodgson, now a research professor in business studies at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Since then, Hodgson has published a number of critiques of mainstream academic economics, including How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (2001) and From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics Without

After the tumult of the 2016 election season has subsided, one result can be safely predicted: The most successful “spinners”—speechwriters and strategists, digital gurus and data miners, pollsters and PR people—will be alternately praised as masterminds and pilloried as manipulators. For those who yearn for an era before political candidates had “handlers”—and who ignore the fact that “authenticity” is as likely to take the form of the incendiary Donald Trump as the idealistic Bernie Sanders or Rand Paul—David Greenberg’s magisterial history of White House hype, Republic of Spin, is a welcome reminder that public relations has long been an integral

In 2008, Matthew Desmond moved into a trailer park on the southern edge of Milwaukee, where most everyone was white. A few months later, he relocated to a rooming house on Milwaukee’s heavily African American north side. There, he lived with a security guard who worked at the trailer park. Desmond was a budding sociologist pursuing his graduate degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, an hour west of Milwaukee. His aim was to better understand life at the hardscrabble margins of the housing-rental market.