The Genre That’s a Shortcut to Wisdom

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. “How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that. I was familiar with Michel Foucault, partly from college coursework but largely from a popular meme that features his most famous…