by Cass Sunstein

Jeffrey Herf has a terrific idea. Many people have noticed that The New York Times is increasingly uninterested in serious books; many others have noticed that the New York Review of Books, while often excellent, can be almost comically narrow. A real advantage of a good book review section, or a good review of books, is that it gets a lot of ideas to a large audience in a pretty short space--so that people can read the book, if they want, but still learn a lot if they don't want. Our political and literary cultures would really benefit from more and better in the way of publicly-accessible reviews.