• China’s Other Path by Yasheng Huang For all of China’s economic achievements, the heyday of its entrepreneurs lies more than 20 years in the past. Renewing that era’s rural capitalism would yield more balanced growth and go a long way toward reducing today’s trade tensions.
• Only Words by Charlotte Brewer For more than a century, the Oxford English Dictionary has dominated language lovers’ bookshelves. Now it is online, and a new edition may never see book covers again. In the digital age, will the OED remain a cultural cornerstone?
• Three Tweets for the Web by Tyler Cowen Welcome the new world with open arms—and browsers.
• The Traffic Guru by Tom Vanderbilt An unassuming Dutch traffic engineer showed that streets without signs can be safer than roads cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights. Are we ready to believe him?
• Rediscovering Central Asia by S. Frederick Starr To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable past.
• In the Beginning Was the Word by Christina Rosen The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as we daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.
• Can America Fail? by Kishore Mahbubani A sympathetic critic issues a wake-up call for an America mired in groupthink and blind to its own shortcomings.
• A History of the Past:
  'Life Reeked With Joy' by Anders Henriksson Possibly as an act of vengeance, a history professor--compiling, verbatim, several decades' worth of freshman papers--offers some of his students’ more striking insights into European history from the Middle Ages to the present.

FDR's widow makes a splash at the United Nations.