Family Secrets

A writer’s personal quest to expose a mass murderer who escaped punishment

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands

Outbreaks and Outcomes

Plagues thrive on more than just pathogens

Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer

Figuring Out Our Fourth Estate

Can democracy survive in the absence of agreed-upon facts?

An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press by Stephen Bates

Earning Our Daily Bread

Did early humans really have it easier than we do?

Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman

Native Wisdom

A celebration of the rich spiritual imagination of tribal peoples

Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday

Power to the People

Looking back on a decade of revolutionary change

The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt

Redefining Women’s Work

The relief of suffering was one means to a great end

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women—and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura

Market Morality

The divine underpinnings of Western prosperity

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M. Friedman

Thought Experiment

Exploring the evolutionary origins of our brains

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Satirist to the Galaxy

The war behind a writer’s words

Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941–1945 edited by Edith Vonnegut

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

The Creator’s Code

Are humans alone in their ability to make art?

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines From Automata to AIby David Hajdu

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Barbarity at the Bataclan

A chilling account of darkness in the City of Light

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the Frenchby John Lambert

Heart of Semi-Darkness

A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors

Masters of Horror and Magic

The German folklorists who helped build a nation

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

Imperiled Planet

The ecological havoc we’ve wrought

The Burning Earth: A Historyby Sunil Amrith

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