David Brooks’s attempt to popularize social science’s recent harvest of insight succeeds, mostly.

The sociology of religion takes everything about its subject seriously, with one important exception.

An ambitious effort to illuminate Old World influences on American popular culture falls short.

There was a time when writers found deep meaning in the sport of boxing. Are those days gone for good?

Heda Margolius Kovály’s Under a Cruel Star is a masterpiece of memoir still awaiting its due

The history of milk—from sacred nourishment to taboo drink to our modern, dairy-saturated abundance.

Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There is too biting to be funny anymore.

Kazuo Ishiguro hangs suspended between two cultures and two languages—a tension that enriches Never Let Me Go.

How Montaigne found happiness: He helped himself.

There’s a seamy underside to children’s book author/illustrator Richard Scarry’s busy, busy world.