I’m tired of Hillary partisans, too—the ones who devote more energy to verbally bludgeoning Clinton’s doubters on the left than to taking on her real enemies on the right. But even if, like me, you are critical of Clinton—of her corporate centrism, cronyism, elitism, and militarism—please consider voting for her anyway. She is probably going to win, but it’s no longer a lock. Trump has a narrow but plausible path: As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gives him a 33 percent chance of winning. True, FiveThirtyEight foresees a better chance than all but Trump’s zealot legions, yet the data

The theme park at the center of Westworld—HBO’s new series, adapted from the 1973 sci-fi film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton—is a simulation of a dirt-on-the brow, snake-in-the-boot nineteenth century frontier town where the only consequence of sin and murder is profit. The park’s hosts are sentient androids covered in impeccable artificial flesh, ignorant of the fact that the “new comers” to the park’s central town of Sweetwater are human guests who pay $40,000 per day for the chance to lay a saloon prostitute or shoot a man just to watch him die. But as expected from Crichton’s

The question of when the Lone Star State will “turn blue” has become as predictable a feature of the Texas campaign season as flags, bunting, Ted Nugent cameos, and generalized public indifference. It’s treated as a math problem. Political analysts come to us with calculations and charts, quantifying the growth of the Hispanic population and tossing around percentages—of eligible Hispanic voters, actual Hispanic voters, and actual Hispanic voters who will vote for Democrats—to predict just when the state might once again claim a Democratic majority. In Texas as elsewhere, we’ve become preoccupied with the numbers game: Everyone’s a strategist.

So what kind of book will emerge from the 2016 presidential campaign? For more than a year now, I’ve been saying a secular metaphysical cleric from deep in South America—Borges, say, or Julio Cortázar—should compose it. I recognize that they’re both “with the ancestors.” But would a Book of, or by, the Dead about Campaign 2016, complete with mix-and-match chapters and faux arcana, be any less opaque to real life than Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who exists in his own alternate universe, where feelings are facts and facts always lie?

Circa August 1993, in a museum in the Netherlands, I had what Adam, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, skeptically calls “a profound experience of art,” something riveting and unselfconscious. (Adam has only experienced the absence of a profound experience of art, and he doesn’t believe that anyone else he knows has really been “changed” by a poem or song, either.) I was eight years old, intensely serious, receiving steady doses of cold medication and family Holocaust lore during my first trip out of the US. In a museum gift shop, I spied a print of a

The last thing most Americans wanted during Barack Obama’s second term was another war in the Middle East. But now we’re in one, and an inevitable and necessary raft of new books is emerging to explain to the public how and why this came to be. Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State is an important contribution to this topical genre, even though his account is deeply flawed in key respects. It is, at best, half the story, and readers will have to look elsewhere for a more comprehensive and balanced assessment.

In the aftermath of the most deadly mass shooting in American history, the issue of gun regulation is once again in the news. Gun-rights advocates continue to invoke the Second Amendment as an obstacle to common-sense gun regulations. Supporters of gun-violence prevention dispute the advocates’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. Some have even suggested repealing or rewriting this much-invoked but poorly understood part of America’s constitutional heritage. It is important to reaffirm a simple fact: The Second Amendment does not belong to gun owners alone but to all Americans. Nor does the Second Amendment pose a barrier to robust gun

The title of Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free is ultimately more interesting than the case that gets made inside its pages. Early open-source-data activists used to say that software should be both “free as in beer and free as in speech.” Witt sticks mostly to the first meaning—i.e., gratis—in his account of the process by which online file sharing since the late ’90s has toppled the once enormously profitable proprietary model of the music industry.

Almost 150 pages into his short, punchy, fascinating book The Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker describes his encounter, at a children’s birthday party, with the “unmistakable powdery orange triangles” he’s adopted as a shorthand for what ails our food system. By this point in the narrative, the reader (along with Schatzker himself) knows just about everything there is to know about junk food. We also understand exactly why Schatzker proceeds to binge on the chips. Even though, as he recounts, “I told myself I would have precisely one,” he takes another, and another, and another, while “the analytical part of my