Nicholas Lemann

This program includes a prologue and epilogue read by the author. Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of...

Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive, Returning emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time. Nicholas Lemann grew up thinking he wanted to be Jack Burden, the ever-curious reporter-historian in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men...

In the 1930s, American colleges and universities began to screen applications using the SAT, a mass-administered, IQ-descended standardized test. The widespread adoption of the test accompanied the development of the world's first mass higher education system—and served to promote the idea...