Among the books that I currently have at my bedside and dip into when I’m a) not futzing around on Twitter, b) not futzing around with game apps on my iPhone, c) not futzing around in the kitchen or d) not asleep is a copy of Joe Bastianich’s just released memoir, “Restaurant Man” (Viking). The book is a raw, throbbing nerve of a biography: If Bastianich has any intellectual filters, he checks them at the door here, and “Restaurant Man” is the better for it. This memoir is not for the politically correct, the morally rigid or the manicured-fingernail crowd that doesn’t want to see, let alone read about, the seedy, shiv-your-sister-for-good-ingredients underbelly of the high-functioning, high-stress hospitality industry...

The president's bold support shifted the mainstream. Andrew Sullivan on why it shouldn't be surprising -- Obama's life as a biracial man has deep ties to the gay experience...

When Toms—a company that, for every pair of shoes you buy, gives a pair to someone in the developing world—was founded in 2006, shoe hoarders rejoiced: A robust collection of kicks was no longer reason for your friends to compare you to a certain Filipina dictator—oh, no! A pile of Toms canvas sneakers and wedge heels actually added to your do-gooder cred. According to its website, by September 2010 Toms had given away more than a million shoes. Toms has since expanded; in addition to shoes it now sells glasses under the same model...

Donald “Duck” Dunn, the bassist who helped create the gritty Memphis soul sound at Stax Records in the 1960s as part of the legendary group Booker T. and the MGs and contributed to such classics as “In the Midnight Hour,” ‘’Hold On, I’m Coming” and “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” died Sunday at 70. Dunn, whose legacy as one of the most respected session musicians in the business also included work with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers as well as with Levon Helm, Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, died while on tour in Tokyo...

Just as everyone was getting ready to throw out the Baby Bjorns and start practicing detachment parenting à la française comes a new book, from the esteemed philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, warning that French motherhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be...

Enraptured by her mother's tales of a lost romance on the eve of the Holocaust, Leslie Maitland went to Europe and tracked down the old flame. Sandra McElwaine on the remarkable book...

Speaking Thursday at the Library of Congress, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau highlighted an intriguing dynamic of satire: The more the intended target reacts, he said, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. If the victim flinches or returns fire at a cartoon, the illustration only gains in power.

If you consider that cause-and-effect, then three editorial cartoonists around the map — in Syria, India and Iran — are presently among the most powerful practitioners in the world.

And this week, news involving that trio reminds just how perilous the act of satire can be in some countries...

“The only security of all is in a free press.”  Thomas Jefferson wrote these words to the Marquis de Lafayette at the age of 80. The reason Jefferson lauded a free press was that he wished, in tense political times, for the U.S. to function as a deliberative democracy, in which an increasingly better-educated citizenry monitored the policy decisions of its elected representatives and judged whether or not they deserved to remain in office.

A better-educated citizenry. That was Jefferson’s mantra, and it should be ours, too...

Government is to blame for rising higher education costs -- but not for the reasons the GOP tells you...

On Thursday night at the Library of Congress, political satirists Garry Trudeau and Matt Bors each offered just the solution for navigating the current perilous shoals of their chosen profession. As in “The Graduate,” advice boiled down to one word — just one word:

Time-travel.

Sci-fi was deftly mined for such prime humor at the Herblock Prize ceremony, in fact, you’d have thought the two featured cartoonists had been chaffeured to the event in Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

Bors, the night’s prize-winner, joked that as a political cartoonist lacking a staff job, the best way to get a newspaper to hire the 28-year-old would be for him to leap into a time machine and dial it backward...