Books, Culture & the Arts

America’s superheroes take on preemptive war, torture, warrantless spying, and George W. himself.

A biography of Al Shanker traces his fight for school reform. But testing created accountability at the expense of education. Linda Perlstein’s story of one school shows us just how truly terrible this is.

Is the United States an empire, a hegemon, or what? And whatever happened to the idea of the U.S. as an exemplary liberal democracy?

Democratic candidates have partners who can be more liberal than they. Republican candidates, ideally, are still married to June Cleaver.

The State Department wants to fund artists to create works for overseas museums — so long as the art promotes U.S. foreign policy.

Filmmaker Michael Winterbottom is that rare Western artist who can depict the streets of Tehran and Karachi. It’s movie stars that trip him up.

Economist Bryan Caplan confuses reality with ideology, to unfortunate effect; economist Richard Freeman calls for open-source unions, which might just point the way to a revival of the labor movement.

The dirty little truth is that American business doesn’t want to pay for disaster preparedness — and so, we don’t have very much of it.

Forthcoming and recently published books from The American Prospect staff.

Was it the Enlightenment’s emphasis on empathy — as expressed, above all, in that new literary form, the novel — that led to human rights?