It’s unlikely that Mitt Romney saw the film “The Graduate” when it appeared in 1967. He was a 20-year-old Mormon missionary in France at the time, isolated from the cultural influences that shaped most Americans of the baby-boom generation, and his taste in movies ran to more wholesome fare like “The Sound of Music.”

Nietzsche reminds us that philosophers have always taken great pains to hide themselves, whether behind the mask of Socrates or the mask of the categorical imperative. It is as if they believe anonymity will help them persuade readers that the systems they create are disinterested, objective, and universally valid—a collection of necessary truths. But this didn’t fool Nietzsche. “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been,” he writes in Beyond Good and Evil. “Namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”

How to portray the state referred to as mental illness? Who tells the story and with what language? Narratives tend to be categorical and unspecific. Dr. Jung famously told his patient James Joyce that the difference between him and his daughter Lucia—a dancer who was permanently institutionalized in her late twenties because of a “deteriorating mental state,” later diagnosed as schizophrenia—was one of control. “You are like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling the other diving,” Jung claimed. But what does that mean? Who was Lucia; what was her story?

French novelist and

In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician. Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery.

The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, spent the two decades after its 1955 publication as an often out-of-print cult novel, read and discussed by a cadre of devotees who, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin Classics edition, “would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic.” For Gaddis fanatics, this history has become a kind of fable: how the great author, driven underground by critical ignorance and the neglect of his publisher, worked various corporate jobs until, in 1975, he would return to lampoon Wall Street in his

Twitter's recent announcement that the social network will allow country-specific censorship aroused fury on and off the Internet. Under the new policy, Twitter will place a gray bar over tweets deemed inappropriate for popular consumption by local governmental authorities. Commentators, protesters, and “Tweetavists” expressed their outrage. Blackout protests were proposed in response, and activists warned of the potential of unreported massacres in Syria. Since then, however, the company has made clear that it will only censor tweets when it receives specific and valid requests to do so. But

"Taylor has had many biographers. Yet their books often reveal more about their authors than her," observes M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and this new meditation, The Accidental Feminist. "Some [biographers] dish," she writes, "some fawn." And some turn their targets into feminist teaching tools. An icon known for beauty, bling, and bridegrooms makes an unlikely women's libber. Yet Lord interweaves readings of Taylor and her roles to serve up a cultural history of femininity—its abuses and uses—that is at once amusing, wrenching, and inspiring.

Starting with Virginia Woolf, whose Three