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

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unique in their sophisticated weaponry and surreal nation-building aspirations, surely demand their own brand of literature, a mode of writing that will capture, somehow, the careless brutality that the world’s most powerful country wrought on two fragile populations. The striking difference between the wars of the past and those of the present is the scale of the imbalance. As one Iraqi in Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near told him just before the invasion, “What is Iraq? This is crazy! The United States is so powerful. It should respect itself. It should use its power

Almost 150 pages into his short, punchy, fascinating book The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker describes his encounter, at a children’s birthday party, with the “unmistakable powdery orange triangles” he’s adopted as a shorthand for what ails our food system. By this point in the narrative, the reader (along with Schatzker himself) knows just about everything there is to know about junk food. We also understand exactly why Schatzker proceeds to binge on the chips. Even though, as he recounts, “I told myself I would have precisely one,” he takes another, and another, and another, while “the analytical part of my

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.

Virginia is southern, but not like the rest of the South. Whereas other states flaunt their Dixie bona fides—their drawls, their barbecue, their own unique balance of manners and swagger—Virginia plays everything a bit cooler. Site of the earliest American dynasties and still home to five of the ten wealthiest counties in the nation, the Commonwealth (as natives fondly call it) has an altogether different attitude toward southernness than the rest of the region. For those Virginians who still consider themselves southern at all, theirs is the baronial South, the mint-julep South; they are descendants of what W. J. Cash

Political theorist Wendy Brown opens her brilliant and incisive new book, Undoing the Demos, with a clarion call: Western democracy is imperiled. According to Brown, democracy has grown gaunt as a consequence of an ascendant political rationality that, like an ideological auto-immune disorder, has assaulted its very fiber and future.

People who write professionally about Mariah Carey are required to note her staggering five-octave range, her fourteen top-ten albums, and her insane number of number-one singles (eighteen and counting). But I’m not here to count or be professional. I’m here to talk about Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel (2009), Mariah’s novel-length album, which is the thing I listen to while I try and try to write about intimacy.