Post Outlook

Douglas Rushkoff's new book, " Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,"opens with a surreal scene: For a fee equal to one-third of his annual salary as a professor, Rushkoff flies to a luxurious resort to advise five ultrawealthy men on how to survive the collapse of civilization. The unnamed men discuss such pressing questions as how to maintain authority over their private security forces after the "event," and they brainstorm solutions.

Rachel Aviv was hospitalized for "failure to eat" when she was 6 years old. The doctors at Children's Hospital of Michigan diagnosed her with anorexia and attributed the problem to tension between her recently divorced parents. Six weeks later, she was eating, and the hospital discharged her to first grade. The experience left Aviv, a staff writer at the New Yorker, with an enduring interest in how mental illness shapes self-understanding.

and September 16, 2022 at 5:40 p.m. EDT Outlook, the print section of commentary and analysis that has graced this newspaper’s Sunday edition for nearly 70 years, came into the world quietly on Dec. 19, 1954. No birth announcement appeared in that day’s paper. No explanation for curious readers as to why the section formerly called Editorials had a new name. Nothing to indicate that the change was more than cosmetic. This is Outlook’s last edition.

In a few days, Americans will begin voting in the midterm elections. Control of the House and the Senate is up for grabs. Two years ago, Joe Biden and Donald Trump were locked in a similarly close battle for the White House. By that point, 2020 had already been extraordinarily eventful, even by the standards of presidential election years. The pandemic, the economic downturn, the protests following the murder of George Floyd - all appeared to herald political change.

Elizabeth is dead. The corgis are dispersed. The regal torch she bore so long is quenched. The British monarchy seems suddenly diminished, its ancient and weighty saga shrunken, tabloidy, Twittery, wee. And now comes the reign of charmless Charles. We await his kingly disquisitions on classical architecture, gardening and homeopathy. Ahead the looming decades yawn. Are you feeling bereft, craving a royal frisson, experiencing a monarchist yen you may not have known you had? No American should.

In 2015, the residents of Yahaba, a rural town in northern Japan, faced a choice. The town's water infrastructure was decaying, but rebuilding it would be expensive and would probably require raising taxes. The residents had been unable to reach a decision. In a bid to break the deadlock, they gathered together to attempt a bold new experiment in political imagination.

What in the world happened to Rudy Giuliani? How did the man whose bravery and resilience reassured a nation during the 2001 terrorist attacks become a bellowing, cheek-stained geyser of nonsense? Andrew Kirtzman sets out to answer that question in " Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor." Kirtzman is well-suited to the task; as a New York-based reporter he covered Giuliani for years and was alongside the mayor on 9/11 as he sought to rally a devastated country.

Jason "Jay" Gould (1836-1892) may have been the most astute analyst of stock markets in American history. He was also a brilliant strategist in any scrap over money.

From its first pages, Gabriel Debenedetti's " The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama" makes clear its ideal reader. Political obsessives - especially those who closely observe Democratic Party politicians and operatives, eager to pull back the curtain and peek into their conversations and debates - are in for a treat.

"In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump's stand on a border wall," Patrick Buchanan, the former Nixon and Reagan White House aide and Republican presidential candidate, wrote in 2019. "Why? Because mass migration from the global South ...