Tony Dokoupil

The story of America's long infatuation with anti-anxiety drugs.

America's all-time favorite pill isn't for birth control, according to historian Andrea Tone. It's a potent little tranquilizer called Miltown, after the New Jersey hamlet where it was born in 1955.

Doug Paul grew up in the midst of the Reagan Revolution. Now he's on the other side of a yawning evangelical generation gap.

Ted Haggard's sex scandal cost him his church, and some of his faith.

A new study argues our personal choices cause more than 1 million premature deaths a year. What, if anything, should the government do to protect us from ourselves?

The best part of "Damp Squid," a series of lexicographic essays by Jeremy Butterfield, isn't the oddball title but the computer that inspired it. The Oxford English Corpus, a database of more than 2 billion words culled from a range of global sources, works like a magic cauldron: it allows researchers to see how any word in circulation is actually being used. "Damp squib," for instance, is British slang for a firework that doesn't fire, or a party that fizzles.

Americans may hoard cash as recession fears grow. But in Riverwest, an enclave of Milwaukee, residents have another answer to money trouble: they'll print their own.

For author Geoff Nicholson, walking is a source of "self-medication," a tonic that beats back depression and helps him write. The happy result is "The Lost Art of Walking," a rambling man's survey of the oddities and intrigues of putting one foot before the other.

News stories captivate us for a moment and then vanish. We revisit those stories to bring you the next chapter.

With lighter wallets and heavier burdens, Americans are rethinking their conspicuous consumption. That's bad news for retailers.

Why men don't make it to the ballot box.

How the presidential candidates knot their neckties, and what it says about them.

Why hood ornaments are becoming things of the past.

The best way to enjoy Tom Vanderbilt's new book, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," is to forget the psychobabble title and merge like a commuter into the text itself.

Devotees claim MonaVie cures their ills and makes them millionaires. But is it just hype in a bottle?

"Stop me if you've heard this," Jim Holt's new history and philosophy of jokes, isn't a topnotch book. It jumps around, from Palamedes to Sarah Silverman, and the closest it comes to a big idea is that jokes "come and go." But there are at least 10 pages (28–38) that everyone should read.

Should mustangs be slaughtered? Our readers' views.

An advocate of the American West's mustangs blasts a proposed government policy to cull the herds.

A - Crooked dad. B - Bad checks, C - Alleged pope scam, D - All of the above

"I'm not much of a consumer." It's a refrain that New York Times columnist Rob Walker heard a lot while researching "Buying In," his fascinating new book about the dialogue between who we are and what we buy.

As an internist at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Santos is used to finding odd things in people's stomachs. So last spring when a young man, identifying himself as an Iraq-bound soldier, said he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station, she believed him.

In his new book, "The Uprising," author and populist gadfly David Sirota argues that a "fist-pounding, primal screaming" revolt is brewing in America—and it's about to boil over.

The knock on television news has long been that it emphasizes style over substance. But style, it turns out, may have some serious substance of its own. In their forthcoming book, "Image Bite Politics," Indiana researchers Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe offer absolution for couch potatoes, defending the flickering tube as a source of valuable political information.

In "Alpha Dogs," London Times editor James Harding investigates the Americanization of global politics and points to a culprit: the Sawyer Miller Group. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the U.S. firm packaged and sold foreign politicians like consumer goods.

For Western democracies, the U.S. presidential race is more than a source of spectacle—it's a preview of a key American export: campaign tactics. "Elections have become as similar as Starbucks," writes London Times editor James Harding, whose stinging new book, "Alpha Dogs," traces the international campaign playbook back to the Sawyer Miller Group, a U.S. firm launched in the 1970s that married Madison Avenue with Pennsylvania Avenue, selling candidates like consumer goods in an "electronic...

Comparing Obama and the Rev. Wright with McCain and Charles Keating.

With the journalism industry struggling, isn't it an odd time to open a museum celebrating the profession?

Films like '21' make people think they can win big at blackjack. The casinos know better.

The Internet is known for giving power to the people. Sites like YouTube and Wikipedia collect the creations of amateurs and kick pros to the curb. But now some of the same entrepreneurs who funded the user-generated revolution are paying professionals to edit and produce online content.

It's a core value of public libraries that their doors are open to everyone. But patience is running thin with one group: the homeless. With nowhere else to go, society's down-and-out flock to libraries for clean restrooms, comfortable chairs and a safe haven.