This politician’s tawdry affair, that executive’s brazen embezzlement—armchair quarterbacking the public scandal has long been an unofficial national pastime. In How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, cultural critic Laura Kipnis dissects why people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring—and sharing—every lurid detail. Laura Kipnis’s new book continues her intellectual engagement with errant desire and the reign of the id, themes that began with her 1999 book Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, and also propelled her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic. Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University. This program is generously underwritten by Paula R. Kahn.