"These wide-ranging essays--on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues--have as a recurring underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries...Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University...

"W.H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD, distinguished professor and author Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the great writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present. Today we are battling too much information, a society changing at lightning speed, algorithms aimed at shaping our every move,...

The 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. We see Kennedy's acceptance speech after winning the California Democratic presidential primary, his death at the hands of gunman Sirhan Sirhan, and the chaos and despair that ensued. The people at the hotel don't know what is coming. Our grief at hearing RFK's own words, so eloquent, so hopeful and inspiring. Watch the horrible events unfold and wonder what might have been....

The children of Britain's ambassador to Burkina Faso, fifteen-year-old Jake, who loves technology and adventure, and thirteen-year-old Kas, a budding social activist, are abducted and spend time in the Sahara desert with Yakuuba Sor, who some call a terrorist but others consider a modern-day Robin Hood.

Portico Reeves's superpower is making sure all the other superheroes, like his parents and two best friends, stay super. And safe. Super safe. And he does this all in secret. No one in his civilian life knows he's actually... Stuntboy! But his regular Portico identity is pretty cool, too. He lives in the biggest house on the block, maybe in the whole city, which basically makes it a castle. His mom calls where they live an apartment building. But...

"Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, two of the foremost spiritual writers of their times, met only once - at Gethsemani Abbey on 26 May 1966. In two and a half years, Merton would be dead. "Individually," says Robert King, "they are important, but considered together they may be even more significant. For although their lives developed independently of one another and took quite different forms, they shed light on each other in wonderful and unexpected...

"Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, was born in 1935 to a peasant family in a remote part of Tibet. Although living in exile, he is the beloved traditional and religious leader of millions of Tibetans and has become a global icon of peace, compassion, spiritual living, and nonviolent struggle for justice. The Dalai Lama's My Spiritual Journey brings the world a message: one of suffering, success, and hope. This vivid and moving portrait of...

The key to American prosperity in this new era of populism is for moral people to make responsibility matter again by renewing personal virtue and form lasting, mediating institutions that will trump the elitist bogeymen and scapegoats for generations to come. If we fail as individual Americans to address this core crisis of responsibility, we have only ourselves to blame for what happens next.