Intellectual Affairs

Almost a century after Prohibition went into effect, we remember it as Puritanism run amok. Scott McLemee looks into a book taking a different view.

Claire D. Clark’s The Recovery Revolution traces the history of therapies that help drug users recover from addiction, sometimes with contradictory and controversial practices, Scott McLemee writes.

In each of two new novels, Loner and Diary of an Oxygen Thief, it is the narrator's attitude that sticks with the reader more than the events recounted, writes Scott McLemee.

Scott McLemee highlights more new books due out from university presses this fall.

Machiavelli's name has long been synonymous with political skulduggery, but Maurizio Viroli offers us a kinder, gentler Machiavelli -- someone who kept the common good in mind in ways greatly lacking in this election year, writes Scott McLemee.