Saturday, Oct. 13, is the 30th anniversary of the most controversial questions ever asked at a presidential debate. CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

This year, while editing many stories about sexual abuse accusations (see “Crouching at every door,” Sept. 15), I’ve gained a lot more sympathy for the women bringing charges. Before running an investigative story, I put reporters through an excruciating process of line-by-line questioning: How do we know this? Are you sure? Do we have the testimony of two or more witnesses regarding who, what, when, where, and—sometimes—why? 

Our surveys show WORLD members are great readers, so we’ve now regularized our review process: Three pages of reviews every issue, and four times a year additional articles on children’s books (late winter), fiction (early summer), history (early fall), and Books of the Year (late fall).

Since my feature in this issue is on history books worth reading, I’ll use this space to note three that aren’t. Let’s start with Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower (Penguin, 2017): Parts are fun to read, but I don’t trust its 560 gossipy pages that take us from the Freemasons to Facebook, touching on Chinese revolts, European plagues, the economic and educational consequences of the Reformation, the interactions of the European royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and the financial House of Rothschild, and much more.

My last column, which explained how alcohol prohibition made it into the Constitution 100 years ago, included this sentence: “Beer’s connection to German brewers—the United Brewery Workers’ constitution required that it’s president speak German—hurt it’s wartime standing.”

“Let’s tear this world apart and build a better one,” actress Anne Hathaway said on Sept. 15 while accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign for her support of LGBTQ efforts. As Hathaway spoke, Hurricane Florence was tearing apart the Carolina coast. At least 43 humans, 5,500 hogs, and 3.4 million chickens died, mostly because of widespread flooding.

Neven Sesardic’s When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics (Encounter, 2016) is one of those thoroughly secular books that supports a crucial Biblical understanding: Not only our bodies but our brains are fallen and naturally sinful.