I make no claims to understand the term “omega point,” as used by theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and physicist Frank Tipler.

“The cool is dead,” says Ted Gioia. Instead, “the future belongs to a different personality type, marked by earnestness, sincerity, skepticism, simplicity, and hard-nosed assertiveness.”

“We’d become Japs, Jews, Niggers. We weren’t before. We fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men, AC, Jimbo, and me. We were mostly self-invented and self-made and certain we had our fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic.”

James MacGregor Burns’s lucid narrative demystifies the Supreme Court, appealing to layman and specialist alike. Burns brings alive the major eras of the Court, along with its key personalities and the presidents who tried (usually unsuccessfully) to mold the Court to their will, or “pack” it.

Binnie Kirshenbaum has produced a diverse body of fiction over two decades. Difficult to classify, her work seems impatient with convention, eager to get to the point.

In 2005 we saw the Paris suburbs lit afire by frustrated young people. Do such events start from little nothings, or are they explosions of major contradictions?

There are at least four kinds of stories in this extremely rewarding collection

Tawada’s novel is a distinguished contribution to the unique paranoid style of the new European novel. While Americans continue to write about identity in a world of mostly established meanings, Europeans are after much bigger game: the meaning of identity itself in a world bedeviled by simulacra and images, shoddy and glamorous.