I’m currently reading Louise Knight’s biography of Jane Addams (1860-1935), a key figure in the Progressive movement and a sort of proto–Community Organizer. I picked up Addams’s trail in Eric Kaufmann’s book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, along with the impression that Addams’s personality and career offer a key to the nature of modern American liberalism.

That impression is still inchoate, and of course none of us can do much about the way we look, but … is it just me, or is the cover photograph on Ms. Knight’s book scary?