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An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

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The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery took the sonar images last summer during an expedition to Nikumaroro, a former British colony in the Pacific Ocean. Although the images are grainy, TIGHAR says they indicate an "anomaly" 600 feet below the ocean's surface.

"It looks unlike anything else in the sonar data," a TIGHAR bulletin on the organization's website reads. "It’s the right size, it’s the right shape, and it’s in the right place."

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Seizing on the Benghazi tragedy, IRS probe, and whatever else they can get their claws into, today’s Republicans on Capitol Hill and the outraged echo chamber at Fox News are vultures of the breed Sam P. Jones saw in the political world of his day. The fresh meat they have no taste for is what we might call productive reform legislation, which their diversionary tactics prevent from being put front and center. The vultures feed instead on rotten issues like abortion (how many babies did Planned Parenthood kill today?) or dismantling Obamacare before it can do good, put government in a positive light, and lead to further reform of a system that is stacked in favor of private insurance companies.

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That's how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of "Duel With the Devil." This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you're the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn't really turn until New Year's 1801 -- and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands' cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

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Packer's inspiration, as he explains in the book's afternotes, was the "U.S.A." trilogy by John Dos Passos, three novels that use a third-person choral method to portray American life in the early 20th century. "The Unwinding," while nonfiction, is narrative rather than polemical or analytic. Each chapter is a story, or an installment in a story, about a person or place. Some of the subjects are famous (Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) because such people, Packer writes, now "occupy the personal place of household gods, and they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how to live a good or better life." But the key figures, the ones whose trajectories arc through the entire book like ribs or rafters, are unknowns: an African-American factory worker turned organizer in Ohio, a disillusioned lawyer who drifts from public service to finance and back again, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with extreme libertarian beliefs and a scion of North Carolina tobacco farmers trying to make it as an entrepreneur. In the book's most bravura chapters, the city of Tampa, Fla. serves as yet another character.

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21. The time he hung out with Elvis in the Oval Office

"Hey Elvis they should call them tranquLOLizers right?"

20. The time Richard Nixon was the original The Dude.

19. More like SWAG IT TO ME

18. The time he told off his dog's haters

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In the midst of the Civil War, newspapers North and South featured stories about soldiers whose dreams predicted war’s end. On April 25, 1863, Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette demonstrated the credence it had given to a local artilleryman’s dream by printing a retraction, regretting that the man’s six-week-old vision of April 23 as “the date of Peace” had not been met. The wife of a Union general, meanwhile, could not banish from her fragmented sleep narratives gruesome premonitions about her sons: “One night I dream that Paul is drowned, another that Benny is dead.”

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So, is this week making you feel a bit nostalgic for the Bush era? Don't. It's been almost half a decade since the 43rd president left office, and he's looking as bad as ever. Of course, that won't stop a small circle of admirers (many of whom used to be on his payroll) from trying, so here's your guide to taking on the five biggest specious pro-Bush talking points put forward this week:

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But there was a time in American history when it wasn't quite so. Laws against selling sex are fairly new – just about 100 years old – and came onto the books long after the sex trade took root in American cities. Does that mean there was a time when selling sex was more tolerated? Or did the law simply take some time to catch up to the new American people's prejudices?

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The reason for this, according to Friedersdorf, is that everyone hated Bush and knew he was incompetent, but people like Obama because he's clearly smart and conscientious, which causes people to defend actions they would have criticized under his predecessor:

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Lincoln is rightly held up as the paragon of the American presidency, so it makes sense that people would ask how he would handle a tough moral question like the use of unmanned killer drones, which has compelling arguments both for and against. WWLD? We consulted experts and the historical record to find out. The answer may surprise you.

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When you look at a gun, do you see danger or safety? It all depends on the angle you’re looking from, risk perception expertssay. The gun control debate is ultimately a clash of competing worldviews, and it’s very fraught. Each side draws on symbolic narratives—I would call them myths—with deep roots in the American past.

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One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.

“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”

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Given that background, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken Stone this long to tackle a straightforward nonfiction project like his Showtime miniseries “The Untold History of the United States,” which tries to counter the jingoistic mythmaking and obligatory “American exceptionalism” of most public discourse about 20th-century history. That phrase refers to a creed that still holds sway (or so polls suggest) among a large proportion of the U.S. population, although it hasn’t been taken seriously by historians for many years: The idea that America has a special and even sacred role to play in world history, and cannot be compared to other nations driven by the grubby realities of politics and economics.

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If we have learned anything from the past decade of book-world scandals — whether over plagiarism, fabrication, Internet sock puppetry or simple inaccuracy — it's that what seems like an obvious ethical violation to some observers will strike others as no big deal. Biography, a genre that can scale the heights or wallow in the gutter, is a particularly delicate enterprise. There's no official — or even quasi-official — biographer's code of ethics, and members of the profession are contemplating changing that. While informed readers are unlikely to confuse the likes of Broadwell with the the authors of definitive, years-in-the-making, doorstop "lives," the biographical profession is at least slightly besmirched by the scandal. "When Jayson Blair did his nonsense, it reflected badly on all journalists," said acclaimed biographer David Nasaw, "and this will reflect on all biographers."

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