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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In just over an hour, Quinn’s “Unconstitutional” takes the audience on an irreverent journey through the entire United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Sure, the Constitution might not sound like a particularly hilarious topic, but it’s much more than a history lesson with Quinn. 

So why focus this special on the Constitution?

“It’s the one thing that we’re all experts about, which is amazing because none of us have read it,” Quinn explains at the start of the show.

Thankfully for everyone involved, the show is just as much about modern America as it is about the country’s founding. Yes, Quinn throws in jokes about Cyrus Griffin and the Articles of Confederation, but there’s still plenty of commentary on the Kardashians and Maury Povich to keep the show accessible.

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A variety of programs about Kennedy will air in the weeks leading up to the milestone anniversary of his Nov. 22, 1963, slaying in Dallas, including "JFK," a four-hour "American Experience" portrait of Kennedy, what he accomplished and what was left undone, PBS announced Thursday.

The science show "Nova" will look at how the forensics investigation into his death would have been handled today and "lay bare some of the problems with forensics at the time," said Beth Hoppe, PBS' new chief programming executive.

The history-oriented "Secrets of the Dead," with a narrative account of the president's shooting, and a look at Kennedy collectibles also will be part of the coverage, along with other specials being planned, PBS said.

Also set for public TV's lineup are specials on American heritage, including a family roots series, "Genealogy Roadshow," and two documentary programs with sweeping views of Hispanic and black history, "Latino Americans" and "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross."

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During the recent restoration of Pinturicchio‘s Resurrection fresco (1494) on the wall of the Hall of Mysteries in the Borgia Apartment at the Vatican has revealed what may be the first images of Native Americans in European art. Vatican Museums Director Antonio Paolucci believes a detail in the artwork refers to the natives of the American continent that explorer Christopher Columbus encountered when he travelled to the New World for the first time.

”Just behind the Resurrection, behind a soldier who is enthralled by the incredible event he is seeing, you are able to discern nude men wearing feathers who appear to be dancing,” Paolucci said.

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The Geneva memorial honours the physician as warrior in the eradication of smallpox. On a Pfizer campus in Pennsylvania, a twin statue tells a different story, positioning Big Pharma as the hero. Neither monument, however, recalls the many casualties of smallpox, and this says a great deal about what we choose to remember.

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In a jam-packed auditorium at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., Paul gave the hard sell, arguing that the Republican message of smaller government, school choice and individual freedom should appeal to minorities who have been victims of state-sponsored oppression, crumbling schools and general subjugation.

But most of his speech was a history lesson, as he spent the first 20 minutes insisting that Democrats, and not Republicans, are responsible for every ill that has befallen blacks in the United States, from the preservation of slavery to Jim Crow. "The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglass until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party,” Paul said. "The horrible Jim Crow in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s was all Democrats."

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The title of Moore's book, "How to Create the Perfect Wife," explains what Day was up to. From an early age -- sniffing at the revelry in that 18th-century party school, Oxford -- Day knew exactly how he intended to live. He planned to commit himself to "the unremitting practice of the severest virtue." He would adopt an austere existence in the country, thinking, reading, writing and doing good works, while receiving few visitors. The one thing he required to achieve this nirvana was a mate, and for that, too, he had something very particular in mind.

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They were. If anything, Martin downplays the ruthless bloodthirstiness of the Middle Ages and the people who ruled them. When Ving Rhames says "I'ma get medieval on your ass" in "Pulp Fiction," he's offering a truly terrifying threat. Make no mistake: Beneath the fairy-tale trappings -- velvet robes and golden crowns, stately castles and the lofty rhetoric of chivalry -- most rulers in the Middle Ages were essentially warlords. Herewith, a few of the worst, and some of their dastardly deeds.

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This post is based on a talk I gave at South by Southwest and a version of it first appeared at BBC Future.

Who invented the Internet?

To answer that seemingly simple question you basically have two options: you can go on for hours explaining the hundreds of people and institutions that contributed crucial advancements to the way that the Internet operates, or you can just say Vint Cerf. Or Leonard Kleinrock. Or Tim Berners-Lee.

People have been fighting for decades over who invented the net. Some will tell you that Vint Cerf’s work on its underlying protocols—TCP/IP—was its true beginning. Others will go back further in history and tell you that Leonard Kleinrock’s work on queuing theory was the real birth. Some may scoff at the idea of conflating the web and the Internet by suggesting Tim Berners-Lee, but in multiple-choice tests of the future the “right” answer will be determined by the next hundred years of how historians choose to tell that story.

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— Walter Benjamin

BEHIND A PLYWOOD PARTITION in Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, a neon light has flickered unseen since the Great Depression. Purchased by Clifford Clinton in 1935, the cafeteria is governed by “Clifton’s Golden Rule,” a precept that ensures that everyone who enters can eat, even those unable to pay in full. Clinton transformed what was formerly Boos Brothers’ Cafeteria into a space that reflects time he spent in the Santa Cruz mountains as a child. A cascade of water spills into a handmade stream that winds its way through plastic redwood trees; on the walls, numerous paintings of forest scenes lit by neon emphasize the idea and its artifice.

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Though condoms are cheap to make and fairly reliable both for contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, many men do not use them due to a perceived trade-off between protection and pleasure.

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From a girl feeding her pet bear in Riggins, Idaho, to a 1903 photo of Alexander Graham Bell kissing his wife, Mabel, inside a tetrahedral kite, here is a roundup of the most beautiful images the famed nature journal has to offer.

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But as Monte Reel persuasively argues in his equally ripping (and far more intellectually satisfying) "Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm," another likely model for Challenger is Paul Du Chaillu, the first modern naturalist to observe gorillas in their native habitat. This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world.

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It’s going to be very tempting to forget this fact over the next few days. The pundits, Catholic and otherwise, have been rapt in the suspense of awaiting the arrival of Pope Francis. We heard a lot of impossible hopes for who the next pope would be, along with the less thrilling reality of the actual candidates. But Catholics, along with the masses who have been suddenly and momentarily interested in Catholic affairs, should remember that the papacy is not to be confused with the church itself. At no time should this have been more clear than those strange and special few days when the Catholic Church was a people—an assembly, a community, a mystical body—without a pope.

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IN THE INTRODUCTION to his novel "Bend Sinister" (1947), Vladimir Nabokov writes the following:

I am not “sincere,” I am not “provocative,” I am not “satirical.” I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of “thaw” in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent.

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Cordain, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology, assured Zuk that human beings had not had time to adapt to foods that only became staples with the advent of agriculture. "It's only been ten thousand years," he explained. Zuk's response: "Plenty of time." He looked at her blankly, and she repeated: "Plenty of time." Zuk goes on to write, "we never resolved our disagreement."

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First, though, the obvious weather irony: climate change didn’t exactly come out in support of that rally. In the midst of the warmest years and some of the warmest winters on record, the demonstration, which focused on stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline -- it will bring tar-sands oil, some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-richest energy available from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- was the coldest I’ve ever attended. I thought I’d lose a few fingers and toes while listening to the hour-plus of speakers, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who were theoretically warming the crowd up for its march around the (other) White House.

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The site was developed through something called Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), a collaboration between the three Brooklyn institutions plus Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science. It contains thousands of historic images, from street corner shots to beautiful period interiors, old postcards, pictures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, everyday life, crime scenes, housing projects, the waterfront, trade cards, and more, ranging from the late 19th century to the late 20th. You could easily get lost on this site for hours. (I did.)

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