Factoring in government welfare payments, very few Americans lack food, shelter, and clothing—but what about purpose and productivity?

The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass (Encounter) helps us understand America by pointing out a fundamental problem: trillions of dollars poured into low-income households to guarantee consumption, but very little to help those adults become productive.

Jay Sexton’s A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic) is our Book of the Year in History because it presents a challenging new perspective in 200 tightly written pages. Instead of telling a conventional story of America’s evolution, he offers the historian’s equivalent of a biologist’s “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of little change punctuated by dramatic disasters that create surprising benefits.

Before becoming WORLD’s chief editor, I sat on the board of directors of a Christian publishing house. When the editorial team spoke of upcoming books, it emphasized the intellectual worth of the book for readers and (since every enterprise needs to make at least a small profit) the material worth to the company. The job of authors was to write good books and do media interviews to promote them, but the marketing department did most of the selling.

Many Christian authors have produced tear-jerking books centered on a child’s death or a friend’s demise. It is good and right to cry about death stalking those we love—Jesus wept and thus gave all of us permission to weep—but manipulating emotion to gain more clicks or sell more books seems not only unseemly but sub-Christian.

In 1861 and 1865 war surged to Virginia farmer Wilmer McLean’s front doors. In 2017 and 2018, mass shootings rocked pastor Jim Crews’ communities.

Ann Gauger received her bachelor’s degree from MIT, did a postdoc at Harvard University, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s department of zoology. Her scientific writing has appeared in Nature, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and other scientific publications. These establishment credentials are helpful because she’s also involved with the Discovery Institute, the world leader in developing and explaining intelligent design theory, which many establishment scientists despise. Here are edited excerpts of our interview.

You may have read in newspapers or heard on The World and Everything in It what happened to Isabella Chow, one of the 20 members of the student senate at the University of California, Berkeley.