Louis Menand has offered a calm and lucid response to the usual jeremiads about higher education–but is its lecture targeted to an ever-shrinking audience?

J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel Commencement has been compared to fellow Seven Sister Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Laura Tanenbaum assesses how Sullivan fills some mighty big shoes.

In Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life, a committed feminist writes a collection of essays about literary men; Laura Tanenbaum monitors these latest dispatches from the gender conflict.

For those too addled by Xbox to grasp subtlety, Mark Bauerlein and Richard Shenkman have titled their respective books The Dumbest Generation and Just How Stupid Are We? For the rest of us, Laura Tanenbaum provides a nuanced evaluation of the laments of these cultural Jeremiahs.

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon sonically reshaped a generation, and Sheila Weller has talked to almost everyone who saw them do it. Laura Tanenbaum, reviewing Girls Like Us, assesses the job Weller does in letting these women roar.