What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? And what are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that National Book Critics Circle award-winning critic William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his three-decade career. Ranging widely across the culture, these 40 essays take up such subjects as Mad Men, Merce Cunningham, and Harold Bloom, the nature of leadership, the value of solitude, the significance of the hipster, and the purpose of art.