Books, Arts and Culture

In search of something beyond the New York art scene, Robert Smithson landed at Utah’s Great Salt Lake, where he created Spiral Jetty amid abandoned oil derelicts. Now his deliberately noncommercial work is at risk of disruption by the return of oil drilling.

Two new books, one by a Boston Globe reporter, the other by the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, recount the Bush administration’s efforts to expand the presidential powers at the expense of the law.

In his new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn examines the state of the neoconservative movement in the wake of the Iraq War.

What was The New York Times thinking when it hired neocon propagandist Bill Kristol for its op-ed pages?

David Rieff’s memoir of the terminal illness of his mother, Susan Sontag, shows the consolations of philosophy deserting her and the denial of truth sustaining her as death approached.

How Michael Barone made The Almanac of American Politics irrelevant.

Self-help finance guru Suze Orman has had an epiphany: Lending institutions could use some regulation.

Hugh Heclo’s history of Christianity in America overlooks the factional, temporal, and profane concerns of the nation’s churches.

In his unguarded, unmediated moments, Alan Greenspan the economist has begun repudiating Alan Greenspan the (anti) regulator. Will anyone notice?