Alex,"When Watching ‘Lunatics' was Entertainment," Neatorama, 4 May. In the 18th century, admission to watch"bedlam" at the world's oldest psychiatric asylum, London's Hospital of St. Mary, cost a penny. In the United States, it was externalized as politics and made"free and open to the public." [Ed: er, Alex didn't say that last part.]

Alexandra Mullen,"The Real-Life Jane Eyres," WSJ, 3 May, reviews Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres.

Benjamin Schwarz,"Where Mother Saw Best," Atlantic Monthly, June, reviews Alice Friedman's Women and the Making of the Modern House and Colin Davies' Key Houses of the Twentieth Century.

Ian Bostridge,"Classical music's twentieth-century tragedy," TLS, 30 April, reviews Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the twentieth century.

Chalmers Johnson,"A Litany of Horrors," TomDispatch.com, 29 April, reviews Alex Arbella's Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Hat tip.

William Hogeland,"American Dreamers: Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history," Boston Review, May/June, on the Pied Pipers of American conservatism and American radicalism. Hat tip.