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According to a widely discussed 2010 report by London's Standard Chartered Bank, the world has entered a new "'super-cycle" in which traditional economic hierarchies are being upended. Ever since the financial crisis, the U.S. has lost the economic strength and force of will to be the world's policeman. The number of Americans, for example, who believe the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally" has spiked to a level unseen since the 1950s. Meanwhile, new powers, like China, India and Brazil, have been unwilling to fill the power vacuum the U.S. has left behind. One could argue that this is a nice change from America's aggressive past interventionism, but it has also helped create the global stalemate on everything from global warming to humanitarianism in Syria. And it's a fact that has the potential to radically affect our future, both in positive and negative ways.

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In the years since the events of the first book, Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery. (He is also the rumored muse for "Left-handed," a recent book of poetry by Jonathan Galassi, and the supposed inspiration for one of the lead characters in "Keep the Lights On," Ira Sachs' well-reviewed new film about a troubled gay relationship).

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According to Jessie Klein, the author of the new book "The Bully Society," it's a problem that's only getting worse. In her excellent examination of the school bullying epidemic, Klein, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University, takes a broad approach to the subject. She first lays out the scope of the problem, before explaining how kids' changing attitudes towards masculinity, the birth of child-targeted consumerism and the erosion of our compassionate society have all helped to create a culture in which children are increasingly feeling overwhelmed and helpless, and, in some cases, prone to violence. Most provocatively, she ties the rise of bullying behavior to America's economic move to the right.

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I tried to make eye contact, but no matter how hard I stared, he didn't notice me. Though, to be fair, he also looked high out of his mind.

"Who is that guy?" I asked my friend.

"No idea," he said. "He must be new to the neighborhood."

After I downed my fifth beer, I mustered up the courage to talk to him. But it was no good. By the time I left, he was making out with someone else in the corner.

And so he joined the dozens of men I'd seen in bars during my 20s, about whom I'd obsess for weeks afterward, thinking: If only I'd had the courage to talk to him, or had the biceps to make him notice me. But unlike those guys, Brian (which is not his real name) became a fixture in my life over the next few months -- or, rather, a fixture on my Grindr app.

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83-year-old Dodson still dispenses sex advice on her website, dodsonandross.com, and now Three Rivers Press is issuing "Sex for One" as an e-book for the first time ever. To mark the occasion we called Dodson to talk about how our attitudes toward masturbation have changed since 1974, when her book first appeared.

Your book has been out for 38 years, and people are still using it as a resource. That's kind of incredible. 

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One of Keller's most memorable obsessions is his search for images of penises in unexpected places. In a playful feature called "I See Penis," he collects images of phallic objects from around the world, sent to him by readers. We collected some of the most memorable entries, and spoke to Colby about penises, the generational divide in gay culture and what it's like to be a 21st-century porn celebrity.

So how did this series get started?

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Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, "Straight," as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of "straightness" really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.

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In his new book, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers," Nowak argues that porn, fast food and the military have completely reshaped modern technology and our relationship to it. He points to inventions like powderized food, which emerged out of the Second World War effort and made restaurant chains like McDonald's and Dairy Queen possible. He shows how outsourced phone sex lines have helped bring wealth to poor countries, like Guyana. And he explains how pornography helped drive both the home entertainment industry and modern Web technology, like video chat. An entertaining and well-research read, filled with surprising facts, "Sex, Bombs and Burgers" offers a provocative alternate history of 20th-century progress.

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These stories are all part a beautifully written, moving new collection of essays edited by Larry Smith, the founder of Smith Magazine, about the instance when a person's life takes a new path. "The Moment" includes contributions from well-known writers, like Pulitzer-winner Jennifer Egan, and numerous first-timers. We've selected six of our favorite here.

I also spoke with Larry Smith over the phone about his project.

What was the thinking behind "The Moment"?

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"Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease," the new book by Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley (respectively, a family therapist and a nonprofit worker with a background in family policy), explains just how profoundly babies and young children are affected by traumatic experiences. In the remarkably researched work, the two women show that early life malnutrition and abuse can affect a kid's nervous system well into adulthood. Children raised in traumatic environments are more prone to cancer, chronic pain and even diabetes. The duo's previous book, "Ghosts From the Nursery," looked at the childhood roots of violence, but this new work is no less significant in its conclusions about American culture.

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In his new book, "Too Big to Know," David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives. In an accessible yet profound work, he explains that in our new universe, facts have been replaced by "networked facts" that exist largely in the context of a digital network. As a result, Weinberger believes we have entered a new golden age, one in which technology has finally caught up with humans' endless curiosity, and one that has the potential to revolutionize a wide swath of occupations and research fields.

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If you met me after I moved to America, you would likely notice a few things. I'm tall. I wear a lot of flannel. I have questionable taste in shoes. And I sound absolutely adorable. I know this because I have been told it over and over since I moved from Canada five years ago. "You sound adorable," said a neighbor in my East Village walk-up during my first week in New York. "Adorable," said a classmate at grad school orientation, right before he told me that Canadians all seemed dreadfully boring.

I had no idea I even had an accent, let alone that I sounded adorable, before I moved here. But in learning about the way I spoke, I ended up learning a lot about my adopted country -- and about myself.

For most Americans, it's almost impossible to tell a Canadian accent from a Midwestern one. And to be fair, the differences are pretty subtle. We pronounce some of our vowels like the British (something linguists call "Canadian shift"), and raise our diphthongs before voiceless consonants (called "Canadian raising"). But most people identify us by our different ways of pronouncing "au" sounds -- which, to some people, sounds like "oot" and "aboot" -- and our tendency to say things like "eh" and "heh" at the end of tentatively declarative sentences.

To make it more confusing, most Canadian celebrities seem to lose their accents as soon as they become even mildly famous. You'd never think that Rachel McAdams or Jim Carrey both hail from Ontario by listening to them. The Canadian of the moment, Ryan Gosling, has famously shifted from a Cornwall, Ontario. accent to a butch Brooklyn truck driver accent over the course of his career. There are even companies that specialize in teaching Canadian actors to start talking like Americans.

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It may seem strange to think of the Web as part of the process of natural selection, but Raymond Neubauer, a professor at the University of Texas, doesn't think so. In his far-reaching new book, "Evolution and the Emergent Self," he argues that technology should be seen as part of our planet's grand evolutionary narrative. He claims that two evolutionary strategies -- one, emphasizing simplicity and rapid reproduction (as in bacteria), and the other, emphasizing complexity and hyper-intelligence (as in humans) -- have been hugely successful in dominating the planet. The book charts the ways those strategies have managed to pop up everywhere from the animal kingdom to cellphones.

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Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total -- its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it's a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city's dullness than about its criminality.

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Part of what makes this process so complicated is that, unlike People's Sexiest Man Alive list, our list is premised on something more complicated. We're looking for men that aren't just physically attractive, but actually have other sexy qualities -- that are interesting and smart or edgy, and this year in particular, politically aware -- and as a result, people's suggestions tend to offer a lot of insight into their own preferences and personalities. But this year especially, the differences between gay men's and straight women's notions of attractiveness have become a talking point since, as you're probably aware, you are a straight woman and I am a gay man.

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Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about the mechanics and meaning of deception than almost anybody else in the world, and his new book, "The Folly of Fools," covers pretty much anything you'd want to know about the topic. The book is an attempt to connect the mechanics of deceit to evolutionary science, and takes a broad survey of the areas in which the two overlap, including animal predation, parenting and people's sex lives. High parasite load, he discovers, for example, is correlated with heightened levels of self-deception, and high levels of deceit, he finds, are closely tied to bad health. Expansive, smart and deep, the book -- a relentlessly fascinating and entertaining read -- will utterly change the way you think about lying.

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