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If some intelligence underlies the universe, as is suggested by a host of modern-day considerations, then why does not that intelligence intervene to allay the oft-horrible destinies that are the lot of so many sentient beings?

A great editorial commentator of the twentieth century, Walter Lippmann, was a major contributor to the central periodicals and journals of the age, including the Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and Yale Review. Men of Destiny, a set of biographical essays on leading figures of Lippmann's day, is arguably the best single source for understanding the persons and the policies of the post-World War I period.In a series of vignettes, the reader is introduced into the lively world of Al Smith, Calvin Coolidge, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Warren Harding, Andrew Mellon, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The collection offers a rare glimpse of the first truly modern generation of American politics and society, and also a type of serious, detached writing that presumes a literate audience, but also one not given over to bias and hostility.The magic of this volume, however, is not in its litany of figures great and small, but Lippmann's comprehensive understanding of the place of America in world affairs. His essay on American imperialism remains a classic: "All the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States." His advice to Americans is not to continue being evasive and grandiose with the rhetoric of equality, but to recognize the changing conditions and get on with the task of rule in as honorable a state as is possible by a holder of power.In his perceptive essays on the League of Nations, the efforts to outlaw war through international law, debt and reparations policies, Lippmann appeals to "time and a sense of reality" in examining all matters political. This volume, graced with a new introduction by Paul Roazen, will enable readers now well into the first decade of a new millennium to do just that.

What connects the United States to China? In the new millennium, material evidence abounds at the most mundane levels of daily living from Boston to Bakersfield: iPhones, IKEA furnishings, even frozen edamame pods. Compatriots of earlier generations could not have anticipated the specifics. But had they been able to peer ahead into our time, many surely would have read this inseparability as meant to be, bound by the material ligatures of a divine plan four centuries in the making. It is this notion of a unique trans-Pacific destiny, with the two countries 'joined at the hip,' that Gordon H. Chang illuminates in Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation With China. Chang, a Stanford University historian, persuasively makes the case that China has been central to the United States' understanding of itself and its place in the world. Europeans' fascination with the 'China mystique,' particularly its commercial possibilities and alluring (if also disquieting) exotica, propelled them to the New World. It took root in the settler colonies and then in the fledgling republic. Americans ran with it. 'The idea of 'China' became an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself,' contends Chang. Since even before its official founding, in other words, denizens of the United States have regarded China as critical to their future. And they have acted on this vision in myriad, consequential ways. Adapted from the source document.