Richard White (Stanford): Corporations, Corruption, and the Modern Lobby: A Gilded Age Story of the West and the South in Washington, D.C. Over It: America's quick recovery from its torture program suggests it wasn't a torture program in the first place. A review of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (and from Bookforum, a review of Four Jews on Parnassus — A Conversation: Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schonberg by Carl Djerassi). An interview with James Patterson, who's topped the New York Times bestseller list 35 times. John Summers' work has shed light on C. Wright Mills and other anarchists; in an interview, Scott McLemee shines a light on Summers himself. After ideology comes the age of innuendo: At a time when there are no deep divisions in policies, the character of leaders is more important than their programmes. You have to give the Somali pirates this: They explore a universal insecurity few of us are willing to face. How can two countries that share a 2,000-mile border and centuries of history know so little about each other? Slate looks at America's dysfunctional ties with Mexico. What's the deal with those blog things? Old-media types who decry the new medium's supposed immaturity are missing the point.
