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Moby-Dick or, The Whale. More sophisticated readers than me can debate whether Moby Dick really is the great American novel. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Herman Melville crafted the great American subtitle. Subtitling turns out to be surprisingly hard, and a lot of us have a tendency to overdo it. Popular foreign policy books, in particular, err on the side of the interchangeably grandiose, and could possibly all be subtitled: Crisis, Power and the Crisis of Power.I mention all this because I just discovered that in 2014, Charles Hill wrote an article called “The ‘Moby Dick’ Guide to
