A wild ride through the dark heart of American health and health care, plus sex, drugs, and stem-cell wars.PHYSICAL is the story of a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American (the author) who gets a three-day "executive checkup" at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality, not to mention glove-wearing doctors and the pair of dominatrix-esque technicians who supervise his stress test quite strictly. James McManus must understand his revised actuarial...

Benjamin Kunkel’s brilliantly comic debut novel concerns one of the central maladies of our time–a pathological indecision that turns abundance into an affliction and opportunity into a curse.Dwight B. Wilmerding is only twenty-eight, but he’s having a midlife crisis. Of course, living a dissolute, dorm like existence in a tiny apartment and working in tech support at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are not especially conducive to wisdom. And a few sessions of psychoanalysis conducted by h...

Jennifer Government is Here to Help!In Max Barry’s twisted, hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations (except for a few deluded holdouts like the French); taxes are illegal; employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly. It’s a free market paradise!Hack Nike ...

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, Geo...

Flatland, like our own world, is on the verge of the millenium. On the last day of the year 1999, a Square—hitherto undistinguished from the other shapes of his two-dimensional world—receives the Gospel of Three Dimensions, revealed to that world's flat inhabitants only once every a thousand years. Transformed by a truth he is unable to conceal, he is promptly condemned as a heretic. His poignant tale is itself a multi-dimensional creation, for it is not only a challenge to our most basic ...

A brilliantly funny look at the tumultuous recent past from the Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist.Remember when everything was going to go to hell when Y2K struck?That didn’t happen, right?But what did happen? To provide a little perspective on a really messed-up millennium (so far), the one and only Dave Barry slips into his historian’s robe (it’s plush terrycloth) and revisits the defining moments in our country’s recent history. As an added bonus, ...

Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where “regenerative” commercial buildings – ones that create more energy than they use – are being designed. A world in which environmentally sound products and processes would be more cost-effective than wasteful ones. A world in which corporations such as Costco, Nike, BP, and countless others are forming partnerships with env...

George Bush was a throwback to a different era. A patrician figure not known for his eloquence, Bush readily dismissed ideology as "the vision thing." Yet, as Timothy Naftali argues, there was no person of his generation better prepared for the challenges facing the United States as the Cold War ended. Bush wisely shepherded Soviet reformers through the liberalization of their system and skillfully orchestrated the reunification of Germany. And following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 199...

The underappreciated presidency of the military man who won the Civil War and then had to win the peace as wellAs a general, Ulysses S. Grant is routinely described in glowing terms—the man who turned the tide of the Civil War, who accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the man who had the stomach to see the war through to final victory. But his presidency is another matter—the most common word used to characterize it is "scandal." Grant is routinely portrayed as ...

A bestselling historian and political commentator reconsiders McKinley's overshadowed legacyBy any serious measurement, bestselling historian Kevin Phillips argues, William McKinley was a major American president. It was during his administration that the United States made its diplomatic and military debut as a world power. McKinley was one of eight presidents who, either in the White House or on the battlefield, stood as principals in successful wars, and he was ...

An intimate portrait of the first president of the 20th centuryThe warm and knowing biography traces Roosevelt's involvement in the politics of New York City and New York State, his celebrated, military career, and his ascent to the national political stage. Caricatured through history as the "bull moose", Roosevelt was in fact a man of extraordinary discipline whose refined and literate tastes actually helped spawn his fascination with the rough-and-ready world of...

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.