Future Tense

Amazon’s Best-Selling Books of 2013, and What They Tell Us About America

1. We’re very confident that we’re good at a lot of things. We’re just not quite sure what they are.

2. We treat women so unequally in the workplace that they’re starting to form support groups.

3. We have wimpy kids.

4. We like history, as long as long as it deifies our forefathers and justifies American exceptionalism.

5. We’re desperate for guidance from Jesus, even if it’s just an author named Sarah Young pretending to be Jesus.

6. We prefer Dan Brown’s Inferno to Dante’s Inferno.

7. We really miss Harry Potter.

8. We’ll tolerate the occasional work of actual literature as long as it’s super-short and there’s a movie.

9. We still like to be told what matters by very serious old white men in blazers.

10. We like science, as long as it proves that heaven is real.

11. We’re pretty sure Jesus was a Tea Partier.

12. We strongly suspect that something’s wrong with us. We’re just not quite sure what it is.