They say there are two kinds of writers. First, the A-line writers: the sort with magnificent prose, literary and rich, whose style is more engaging than their ideas. These people are a pleasure to read just for the sake of reading. Then, the B-line writers: Their ideas outweigh their sturdy but unremarkable writing. They are not stylists but thinkers, polemicists, detail hounds. People read their work for the thoroughness of thought. There is, of course, the minuscule array of writers who encompass both groups, but they are rare and very wealthy.

For plucky upcoming millennials, the culture wars mostly seem a thing of the past, having ended with a collective whimper of toleration instead of a fundamentalist bang. The new consensus, among political commentators and academicians alike, is that the culture wars have run their course, and that the Christian Right has lost.

What is money? Most economists wrestling with this question will invoke the classical definition: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Kabir Sehgal wouldn’t disagree. But he’s also eager for people to move beyond such a narrow definition and consider the deeper meanings of money. Sehgal, a vice president at JPMorgan, is obviously no stranger to the stuff. But in Coined, he’s less interested in accumulating money than in reveling in its mysteries, its curious status throughout history, and its central place in the human imagination. In this highly readable book, he offers an enthusiastic romp through

Virginia is southern, but not like the rest of the South. Whereas other states flaunt their Dixie bona fides—their drawls, their barbecue, their own unique balance of manners and swagger—Virginia plays everything a bit cooler. Site of the earliest American dynasties and still home to five of the ten wealthiest counties in the nation, the Commonwealth (as natives fondly call it) has an altogether different attitude toward southernness than the rest of the region. For those Virginians who still consider themselves southern at all, theirs is the baronial South, the mint-julep South; they are descendants of what W. J. Cash

Sociologist Peter Berger is right to see academe, alongside law and media, as one stronghold of “Euro-secularity” in a sea of American faith. Not so long ago, theology was academe’s queen. Today, God talk is largely verboten in American universities, even inside religious-studies departments like my own.

Imagine a delegation of chiefs from the Six Nations of the Iroquois passing through the rural town of Palmyra, New York, in the early 1800s. Among them is Red Jacket, the nephew of the most famous Iroquois prophet, Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake and his followers preached sobriety, conversed with spirits, and implored their beleaguered people to return to Iroquois traditions like the longhouse. Handsome Lake’s visions involved hidden scriptures that described the religious origins of the conflict between his people and whites and included a figure similar to Jesus. Quaker missionaries had lived among his tribe.

Transparency is now such a venerated public good in America you’d suspect that—like the Grand Canyon and three-card monte—it has always been with us. But no, writes Michael Schudson in his learned history The Rise of the Right to Know. Transparency, it turns out, is only about as old as rock ’n’ roll (though, as is the case with rock ’n’ roll, its champions can point to historical precursors that gave it its form). Given this hint, you might then guess that transparency—and its bureaucratic manifestation, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—was conjured into being by the civil-rights movement or

One autumn afternoon in AD 312, Constantine the Great searched the sky to determine which gods he should enlist in his campaign to win control of Rome. According to legend, what he saw above the noonday sun signaled both a turning point in world history and a radical shift in the meaning of the symbol that would soon dominate Western civilization. “He saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens,” the fourth-century bishop and historian Eusebius wrote, “and bearing the inscription, CONQUER BY THIS.”

The unseemly origins of Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations can be traced back to at least 1985, when the chairman of the New York State Republican Party visited him in his Trump Tower office, hoping to recruit him to run for governor. Trump responded that he’d only consider running for president. It was an idea encouraged by his driver and bodyguard Tom Fitzsimmons, a former cop. As Wayne Barrett writes in his classic and still definitive (as far as it goes) 1992 biography Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, it was Fitzsimmons who introduced Trump to Marla Maples: The notion was