From Prospect, from '68 agitator to staunch supporter of George W. Bush's Iraq war—what explains Hitchens's political journey? Does life have meaning? If so many people today feel that life is a sound and fury signifying nothing, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Richard Rorty are partly to blame. In the second Foreign Policy/Prospect list of top public intellectuals, here are the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time. From Words Without Borders, a special issue on China. Men Evolving Badly: American manhood is in crisis, judging by a surge of manifestos such as The Decline of Men, The Disposable Male, and Save the Males. The introduction to Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur and Dawn Burgess. Rebecca Reich reviews Christopher Robbins’s Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared. From The New York Times Magazine, a special issue on the environment. Thomas Frank on Obama's touch of class. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, there are no second acts in American lives — England, however, is a whole 'nother story. The premise of Rayo Casablanca's 6 Sick Hipsters is enticing: someone is murdering those atrocious denizens of Williamsburg, Brooklyn known as hipsters. Shakespeare for Everyone: Ron Rosenbaum on the most interesting books, movies, and Web sites related to the Bard.
