Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s new book feels more like the first of many acts than an authoritative memoir. And the main body of the narrative remains, so far as financial history is concerned, very much a work in progress.

Years ago, I taught a course on the French Revolution. At the end of one class, an earnest student posed a question about something that clearly troubled her. Being Korean, she wondered what this ruckus in eighteenth-century France had to do with her. Why study it in such exhaustive detail? Was France really that important? And why should what happened there 225 years ago matter to a young woman from half a world away?

The unseemly origins of Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations can be traced back to at least 1985, when the chairman of the New York State Republican Party visited him in his Trump Tower office, hoping to recruit him to run for governor. Trump responded that he’d only consider running for president. It was an idea encouraged by his driver and bodyguard Tom Fitzsimmons, a former cop. As Wayne Barrett writes in his classic and still definitive (as far as it goes) 1992 biography Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, it was Fitzsimmons who introduced Trump to Marla Maples: The notion was

America’s justice system has been broken for a while. You can trace the development of our current blight of mass imprisonment—we have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world—in a nearly unbroken lineage from President Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of a “war on drugs,” through the disproportionate penalties for crack versus powder cocaine possession in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton’s reelection friendly 1994 crime bill. For many Americans, most of them poor and from communities of color, what policy wonks call the carceral state is a daily fact of life. That the iniquities of the entire justice system,

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“Normal” is forever a relative concept, but, as James K. Galbraith surmises in his ambitious new book, the taken-for-granted background conditions of mass prosperity in America seem increasingly to be a dead letter. The latest forecasts put the US economy on track to grow at an anemic 1.7 percent in 2014. The official unemployment rate, 6.1 percent at this writing, is almost back to normal—or, you know, “normal.” But economists estimate that if discouraged job seekers were included in this statistic, the real number would be 9.6 percent, and the jobs the recovery has created are overwhelmingly in the low-wage

The socialist Rosa Luxemburg met her lover and lifelong collaborator Leo Jogiches at a student-radical club in 1890. Luxemburg was nineteen. Jogiches, a few years older than her, was known for his severity and single-minded devotion to the cause. She was drawn to his zeal, and within a year they were a couple, but not a happy one. He resented her success, refused to be seen with her, and tried to control where she went and what she did. When he found out she was seeing someone else, he threatened her with a gun. Luxemburg’s letters to him, written over

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.”

Some people will go through spectacular contortions to ignore politics and its role in the global economy. Technology just changes. Social change just happens.

The torrent of money currently pouring into tech start-ups is commonly likened to a digital-age gold rush, so it’s more than a little ironic that the closest thing to actual gold on the Internet did not come from Silicon Valley. Instead, the digital currency known as Bitcoin came from a cabal of programmers spread across the world who were motivated not by catered lunches and future riches but by an ideological interest in how computer science could reinvent money.