The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple: King Arthur was "very old IP." See, it wasn't fresh IP, like the upcoming Emoji Movie, which is about those little yellow graphics that began flooding your text messages in 2010. It wasn't IP from 30 years ago, like Baywatch—the movie version of the 1980s TV show people thought would be a monster hit when it opened a week after King Arthur: Legend of the Sword but was actually a huge flop.

No, King Arthur was IP from a millennium

Vice President Henry Wallace once observed of his boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “He doesn't know any man and no man knows him. Even his own family doesn't know anything about him." It's not surprising that Wallace would think ill of a man who dumped him from the ticket while seeking a fourth term—a move that enabled Harry Truman, rather than Wallace, to ascend to the presidency. But given Roosevelt's relationship with his own children, Wallace's comment was probably a product of insight, not just bitterness.

Most Americans have thought about Thomas Jefferson much as our first professional biographer, James Parton, did. "If Jefferson was wrong," wrote Parton in 1874, "America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." Unfortunately, Jefferson at present looks to be more wrong than right, at least among most academic historians, and therefore America has become more wrong than right, especially on matters of race. As John B. Boles points out in this good, solid, generally fair-minded biography, Jefferson was "once lauded as the champion of the little man," but "today he is vilified as a hypocritical slave owner professing a love of liberty while quietly driving his own slaves to labor harder in his pursuit of personal luxury.

Ray Sprigle probably had no idea when he set out for the assignment of a lifetime that his journalism would become, to quote the overused cliché, "the first rough draft of history."

His 1948 series in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days"—shocked readers in western Pennsylvania. Through syndication in 14 other newspaper markets around the nation it sparked a lively debate, especially among some Southern editors who were appalled that a Yankee reporter, disguising himself as a black man, could tell them what was obviously wrong (everything) with separate-but-equal segregation. And it drew praise from liberals such as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Some eight miles west by south of the central North Carolina town of my boyhood, one comes upon red-clay dairy country, furnished with lush pastures and comfortable houses. Hawfields, as the neighborhood is called, dates from colonial times: The route of Cornwallis’s fateful retirement toward Yorktown runs close by. It was the home of W. Kerr Scott, governor of North Carolina from 1949 to 1953 and U.S. senator from 1954 until his death in 1958. 

In 1882, a Minnesota writer and politician named Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, perhaps the most popular work of pseudo-science of the 19th century. Its opening pages confidently set forth 13 propositions about the legendary island kingdom—notably that Atlantis was real, that it was an advanced civilization with colonies in ancient Egypt and South America, and that it invented the alphabet and writing, practiced monotheistic sun-worship, and possessed sophisticated scientific know-how. Regrettably, as Donnelly wrote, "Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sunk into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.

Expanding school choices for parents remains a heated debate, from states providing families vouchers for their children to attend private schools, to school boards creating magnet schools and other public alternatives, to states and districts granting charter schools freedom to innovate the way schools serve children. You may or may not like those choices, but they stem from a common and important instinct: give parents more options for their children, especially parents whose neighborhood schools suffer from low expectations and children not learning at the appropriate grade level.

Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today editorial writer and author of Why Boys Fail (2010), reports on one of the most central elements in the

When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper's, and the New Yorker. But on July 19, 1955, his car was discovered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Although his body was never found—unless you believe the handful of people who claim to have seen him since—and he had told friends that he'd like to start a new life in Mexico, it is safe to assume that he killed himself, in part because he often seemed half in love with easeful death.

Kees's work has maintained a small but loyal following since then.

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the shipping industry that carries them; it is both the European Union's and the United States' biggest trading partner.

As a region, it is also more robust than either the EU or the United States, where the International Monetary Fund forecasts that growth will rise from 1.6 percent last year to 2 percent next year. In contrast, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will grow by more than double that rate (5.

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets. As change proceeds exponentially, our biggest problem may be adjusting to all the dynamism.

That's one story. But Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and coauthor of the wonderful blog Marginal Revolution, has another. America is much less dynamic and progressive than most of us imagine. We think we are a start-up nation but new firms have been "declining since the 1980s.

Boston

To endow Emma Bovary with his feelings, Gustave Flaubert endowed objects with her feelings. When Rodolphe reneges on his promise to elope, Emma is prostrated by "brain fever." The trappings of sainthood substitute for erotic satisfaction: "She bought rosaries and wore holy medals. She wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening."

"Take that table, for example," Henri Matisse (1869-1954) said to the American painter and writer Clara T. MacChesney in 1912. "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." Matisse's teacher, Gustave Moreau, had told him that he was destined to "simplify" painting.

David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4 hours of the 18-hour series he has just cowritten and directed for Showtime—Twin Peaks: The Return—make that clear. There are scenes here, moments here, flashes here, alternately shocking and dazzling and terrifying and repulsive and compelling, that you will remember for the rest of your life.

Boston

To endow Emma Bovary with his feelings, Gustave Flaubert endowed objects with her feelings. When Rodolphe reneges on his promise to elope, Emma is prostrated by "brain fever." The trappings of sainthood substitute for erotic satisfaction: "She bought rosaries and wore holy medals. She wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening."

"Take that table, for example," Henri Matisse (1869-1954) said to the American painter and writer Clara T. MacChesney in 1912. "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." Matisse's teacher, Gustave Moreau, had told him that he was destined to "simplify" painting.

The locked-room mystery was a favorite subcategory of detective stories in the early 20th century. By 1941, it seemed all possible variations on getting a murderer into or out of a room locked, sealed, barred, closely observed, or otherwise inaccessible, without resort to supernatural agencies, had been discovered, and Howard Haycraft, in his definitive history Murder for Pleasure, was warning newcomers not to attempt it: “Only a genius can invest it with novelty or interest to-day."

Despite such discouragement, the device lives on in the 21st century, amid some confusion about what constitutes an example.

When we look back on the late-19th/early-20th century and think of the technological changes that made life “modern,” we usually imagine the conquests of distance: telegraphs and telephones, trains and steamships, automobiles and airplanes.

One of the quieter celebrations of a literary centennial may be the one for Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot's first book of poems, published in 1917.

Eliot was then 29 years of age and had published a number of poems, essays on philosophic topics, and reviews. Married to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, he and his wife experienced a rocky marriage, to say the least—both of them frequently ill with minor complaints, even as her psychological state grew increasingly disturbed. Eliot taught at a couple of private schools and gave evening extension lectures to adults; but his financial situation was unsettled until, in March 1917, he went to work at Lloyd's Bank in London, in the colonial and financial

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the shipping industry that carries them; it is both the European Union's and the United States' biggest trading partner.

As a region, it is also more robust than either the EU or the United States, where the International Monetary Fund forecasts that growth will rise from 1.6 percent last year to 2 percent next year. In contrast, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will grow by more than double that rate (5.

On January 26, 1945, this is what an American soldier in Belgium wrote home to his parents:

I'm warm and comfortable now, and sitting here in front of a fire. And this is one of the times when I fall into sympathy with home.
I don't think I ever realized or appreciated before how lucky I am. You know, the four of us make a grand family. There's nothing material we don't have that we could want. .  .  . I wish I could be aware of this when we're all together. I imagine you feel pretty much the same way, don't you? Well, maybe we will appreciate it after this.
My thanks for being such grand parents, with my love.

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets. As change proceeds exponentially, our biggest problem may be adjusting to all the dynamism.

That's one story. But Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and coauthor of the wonderful blog Marginal Revolution, has another. America is much less dynamic and progressive than most of us imagine. We think we are a start-up nation but new firms have been "declining since the 1980s.

Pax Romana is a magic mirror that shows us the bloody beasts we must become to raise and rule an American empire. Few seek such a course, but it is the inevitable end of many or indeed most realistic American foreign policy options, especially in the Middle East. How must we behave if we wish to hold dominion as securely as the Romans did over sundry ominous, contumacious, and well-armed folk?

First, we must be implacable in war. We must break our enemies. This was once the American way, as the Confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese can attest. To the broken, mercy and alliance can be extended: To this American habit the same witnesses can be called. "Spare the humble and war down the proud" is how Virgil described our

In the deceptively thoughtful 2014 action film John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a recently widowed assassin who comes out of retirement after Russian gangsters beat him up, steal his car, and kill his dog. Miffed about the car, not too happy about the beating, but furious about the demise of his puppy, Wick goes on a murderous rampage and ends up killing 3,625 people, all of whom deserve it.

Motion pictures often provide subtle, impossibly delicate critiques of society that go over the head of the average moviegoer. This is particularly true in the macroeconomic arena, where films address flaws in popular economic theories, such as the misguided notion that low unemployment is a good thing.

The New Deal's Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project remains a landmark of documentary photography—and social realism. The project launched the careers of several major photographers, and when we think of Depression America, we see its searing images. But it was a political failure. So, too, is this disorganized book.

Taschen's standard format makes for an affordable, quality product, and as an aesthetic and ideological statement, the photographs still pack a punch. The tradeoff: The doorstop size, packed with photographs, and text printed in English, French, and German leave limited room for editorial context.

Last year, at age 70, Annie Dillard received a National Medal for the Arts and Humanities for, as the citation put it, “her profound reflections on human life and nature." The presentation, made at the White House, had a valedictory air, as if capping a career that's more or less concluded. A similar sense of summation informs The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, which collects a sampling of the nonfiction Dillard has written for more than four decades, much of it about the natural world.

Annie Dillard's career took off in 1975, when she won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a chronicle of her excursions into the fields, woods, and mountains near her home in Roanoke, Virginia.

In June 2001, physicist and self-styled "eclipse chaser" Frank Close found himself at an isolated roadside stop deep in the Zambian bush, chatting with a small local boy. Close was trying to explain his purpose in being at this remote outpost, why he had traveled all the way from England—some 5,000 miles—to experience a three-minute total eclipse of the sun.

The boy was skeptical. "Who's arranged this eclipse?" he wanted to know. Close explained that nobody had arranged the eclipse, that it was a natural phenomenon: "Sometimes when the moon crosses the sky, it gets in the way of the sun.

Anyone wishing to learn more about the economic effects of immigration on America and American workers would do well to read this book. George J. Borjas is a highly respected economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of immigration. While most of his past writings have been technical works, We Wanted Workers is chiefly intended for a popular audience. It is very clearly written, contains ample yet easily digestible data, and offers a balanced and careful treatment of an issue that is generally treated in a very different manner.

The "narrative" to which the subtitle refers is the widespread view that immigration is an unalloyed benefit for America and those

In January 1944 the up-and-coming novelist Vladimir Nabokov sent the oracular literary critic Edmund Wilson a letter, with two enclosures. The first was a sample of Nabokov's new translation of the Russian verse novel Eugene Onegin; the second was a pair of socks Wilson had lent him. The translation, he disclosed, had been done by "a new method I have found after some scientific thinking." In one sock Nabokov had poked a hole, which his wife, Vera, had sewed up with "her rather simple patching methods."

Sometimes Wilson would tuck in a note to Nabokov a paper butterfly with a wound-up rubber band, which, on opening, "buzzed out of the card like a real lepidopteron," delighting Nabokov, whose sideline was the classifying of

Pax Romana is a magic mirror that shows us the bloody beasts we must become to raise and rule an American empire. Few seek such a course, but it is the inevitable end of many or indeed most realistic American foreign policy options, especially in the Middle East. How must we behave if we wish to hold dominion as securely as the Romans did over sundry ominous, contumacious, and well-armed folk?

First, we must be implacable in war. We must break our enemies. This was once the American way, as the Confederacy, the Germans, and the Japanese can attest. To the broken, mercy and alliance can be extended: To this American habit the same witnesses can be called. "Spare the humble and war down the proud" is how Virgil described our