The great flaw in American democracy has nothing to do with voting machines or lobbyists; it is the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty.

David Margolick on David Mamet; Emily Nussbaum on Heidi Julavits; science fiction columnist Dave Itzkoff; and senior editor Dwight Garner on best sellers. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host.

How the invention of radio helped catch a pair of notorious fugitives fleeing on the high seas.

Industrialism gave us a new generation of leaders ? we might even call them America?s second founders.

One of the forces behind ?Animal House? reveals that the movie was truer to life than you might have guessed.

To David Mamet, too many Jews are negative, weak, defeatist, ignorant and ungrateful.

Thomas McGuane?s West in these astonishing stories is a place of tonal aggression and tourist ?pull-offs,? of bad fences making bad neighbors.

What photographs of the attack on the World Trade Center can tell us, and what they can?t.

Debate on Orson Welles used to center on the cause of his decline. Now the decline itself is in question.

The narrator of Janna Levin?s novel calls Gödel and Turing her ?two mad treasures.?

Miriam Toews displays her wit in two early novels, about single mothers and a sad-sack mayor.

In the comments he wrote in the margins of his books, John Adams was as pungent as he was copious.

Before the publication of Ms. Pessl's book "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," there was grumbling about another attractive young writer earning a big advance for a first novel.

Believing that ?poetry is a primal impulse within us all,? Stephen Fry aims to prove it in his new book.

Julie Phillips?s engrossing and endlessly revelatory biography allows the woman behind the alias to step into the spotlight.

Randall B. Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear.

Nora Ephron, chronicler of life's absurdities, laments the dirty tricks of aging.

In Eliza Minot's novel, obligation brings adult siblings together.

A new translation of "The Three Musketeers" gives voice to Dumas's swift, singular style.

?Strangers in the House? is full of engaging prose, wicked humor and honesty so glaring it makes you squint.