In Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, 14-year-old Sophie Amundsen begins receiving mysterious letters from a philosopher, encouraging her to consider deep questions about life, the universe, and what it means to be human. One day, she is tasked with considering the differences between humans and animals, and reflects on the differences between her cat and herself.

There was once a time in the 1990s when Robert Kaplan was rightly regarded as a prophet. “Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels”—this was the parade of horribles Kaplan bracingly foretold in

I have known the author of this memoir, Professor Jerome Cohen, on and off for some decades through his son, Ethan Cohen, a top gallerist in New York who introduced the likes of Ai Weiwei to America. As part of the respect you show the parents of a friend, you don’t probe in detail about

Marcie Rendon was in her mid-60s when her first novel, Murder on the Red River, was published in 2017. She had written for the theater, plus a couple of children’s books, and her bio line also describes her as a “community arts activist,” but nothing she’d done up to that point would have suggested she