The cultural critic Laura Kipnis likes big themes (love, gender, sexual scandal) and bigger personalities (radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, former congressman Anthony Weiner). They’re all stops in her latest book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation (Metropolitan Books, $25), a smart collection of weird, funny, and devotedly iconoclastic essays. A media studies professor at Northwestern whose work has appeared in Slate and Harper’s Magazine, Kipnis is particularly fascinated by anxieties that arise around contemporary heterosexual masculinity. Here, she turns her sharp eye on stalkerish paparazzi, Hillary Clinton haters, and literary critics with daddy issues—and, happily, she’s not finished yet. This book, she writes, should be considered an “interim report.”