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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

Ed Park<...

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age, Virginia Eubanks’s A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving, and Téa Obreht’s Sunrise all feature among the best reviewed books of the week.

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In early 2014, a pair of political scientists published a striking study on the health, or lack thereof, of American democracy. Authored by Princeton University’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern Univesity’s Benjamin Page, the study combed through decades of data to try to answer a single question: When it comes to American politics, who truly governs?

The U.S. still had...

The English word “agency” comes from the Latin agere, meaning “to do” or “to drive,” and goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ag-, meaning “to lead or move.” In the 1600s, there was a shift in its sense. The word drew on ideas from alchemy, where the agent was the active substance that spun gold from the mundane. People also began to use it to describe the nego...