By Randall Kenan
'Blacks, in other words, are human; and all humans are narcissists," Debra J. Dickerson writes in her introduction in the first volume of a projected new annual series, "Best African American Essays." She goes on to suggest a rationale for such a collection, clearly anticipating all sorts of cavils about the need for such a race-conscious gathering in such a fast-forward age of African-American assimilation.

By Carl Hartman
The Associated Press
In the 1921 play that invented the word "robot" -- Czech writer Karel Capek's "Rossum's Universal Robots" -- mechanical, highly intelligent slaves mount a revolt and kill all humans but one.

Ever since, science fiction has explored the idea of robots outsmarting, dominating and destroying the human race. Author P. W. Singer, at 33 a Senior Fellow at the highly serious Brookings Institution, can't resist the fascination of the topic, but he isn't writing fiction. He treats the possibility with appropriate seriousness in "Wired for War," a meticulous account of the latest military robots.

By Todd Shy
Denis Dutton's ranging new book, "The Art Instinct," extends the insights of Darwinian evolution to the realm of art. "Given their evident universality," Dutton writes, "the pleasures of the arts should be as easy to explain as the pleasures of sex and food; that they are not is a central problem for anyone wanting to broaden the relevance of evolution to the whole of human experience."

By Phillip Manning
What's the most important scientific discovery ever made? Newton's law of gravity? Darwin's evolution? Einstein's relativity? None of the above, according to author Thomas Hager. It was, he claims, a breakthrough engineered by two men you have likely never heard of, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Their great discovery? They learned how to make bread -- and war -- from air, enabling mankind to feed billions more people and kill millions more as well.

By Carlin Romano
Philadelphia Inquirer

Barack Obama mocked Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy expertise until he didn’t.
Hillary Clinton savaged Obama’s ability until she praised it.

John McCain vaunted Sarah Palin as the best person in the
country (after him) to be president, until he lost, whereupon he
declined to back her in 2012.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Well, he told lots of children, when he visited their schools, that it’s important to talk nice.

 By Robert Lalasz
'Outliers" might be Malcolm Gladwell's best book yet -- a passionate, gripping, sophisticated yet superbly readable examination of exactly what makes people successful ... and why the rest of us are totally wrong about that "what."

So why is "Outliers" Gladwell's biggest failure, too?

By Julia Keller
Chicago Tribune
When it comes to scholarly ideas, Lennard Davis flies by the seat of his pants.

But only if those pants are corduroy. And not just the seat. The rest of fabric, too, inspires reflection.

Early on in his classic 1978 study “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises,” economist Charles P. Kindleberger observed that bad times are good for books on financial meltdowns. There was lots of work on such crises during the 1930s, for example, but very little during the postwar boom. A spate of work on panics and crises appeared during the economically troubled decade of the 1970s, including Kindleberger’s book.
In this vein, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, perhaps the world’s most famous economist, published a very good book in 1999 titled “The Return of Depression Economics” on the context, causes and consequences of the Latin American and Asian financial crises of the 1990s.