"Crying looks at the way people have understood weeping from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through tears found in today's films, advertisements, and therapies. Philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, William James, and Sartre have attempted to explain tears, as have physiologists from Hippocrates through Darwin and contemporary neurophysiologists and ophthalmologists. Psychologists, anthropologists,...

"Couch potatoes, goof-offs, freeloaders, good-for-nothings, loafers, and loungers: ever since the Industrial Revolution, when the work ethic as we know it was formed, a chorus of slackers has held the pretensions of hardworking respectability up to scorn. Reviled by many, heroic to others, these layabouts stretch and yawn their way through life and literature while the rest of society sweats. Their history is the history of labor in negative. From...