History Lesson
The following is from Louis Menand's introduction to his book American Studies. Menand is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book The Metaphysical Club won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history. He teaches at Harvard.

The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present. People ask, Where are the great Hollywood movies, the great pop songs, the great television newsmen, the great Democratic presidents, the great public intellectuals, the Great Books?, as though these were all eternally available types. They are not. Their availability is a myth.

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The impulse to hold on to the past is very strong, and it is often hard to understand why things that worked once can't continue to work. A lot of energy and imagination are consumed trying to fit old systems to new settings, though the pegs keep getting squarer and the holes keep getting rounder. In the end, the only way to make the past usable is to misinterpret it, which means, strictly speaking, to lose it.

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We look backward for clues because, the future being the other side of a closed door, we have no place else to look. But even in America, where people are supposed to have no sense of history, there is a persistent reluctance to play with the cards that are on the table. We want to play with yesterday's cards, but yesterday has already unraveled past reconstructing. Today is the only day we have.

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Here's Menand's hilarious review of the new edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

In this interview, Menand discusses The Metaphysical Club. (The interview is available in three formats: print, audio, and video.)

Here you can listen to Menand discuss The Metaphysical Club on The Connection.