The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Despite what is often reported, new mothers don't "opt out" of work. They are pushed out by discriminating and inflexible workplaces. Today's workplaces continue to idealize the worker who has someone other than parents caring for their children.

Conventional wisdom attributes women's decision to leave work to their maternal traits and desires. In this thought-provoking book, Joan Williams shows why that view is misguided and how workplace practice disadvantages men--both those who seek to...

"To confront American culture is to feel oneself encircled by a thin but strong presence. I call it Emersonian, an imprecise term but one that directs us to a dominant spirit in the national experience." Thus Irving Howe, America's distinguished social critic and a longtime reader of the Sage of Concord, begins this illuminating discussion of Emerson and his disciples and doubters. What is the Emersonian spirit? What inspired it, what propelled it? And what does it mean to us today?

History gave Emerson his opportunity and then took it away. Coming to manhood during the...

Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture.

Drawn from Marcus's 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground," Geeshie...