Magical Mind

Albert Einstein’s life

EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe By Walter Isaacson

Dismantling the Dream

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America By Daniel Brook, Henry Holt

Happy Talk

What did we know about joy, and when did we know it?

The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is WrongBy Jennifer Michael Hecht / Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy By Barbara Ehrenreich

The Impulse to Exclude

Ralph Ellison wrote one great novel and then lived a life that is hard to admire

Hearsay

From the divinely inspired to the pathological, a history of auditory hallucination

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination By Daniel B. Smith

An Epic in Flux

Gilgamesh, the world’s first great literary work, is still being pieced together

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh By David Damrosch

Design Problem

Does the internal physiology of animals imply a harmony of structure and function?

The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself By J. Scott Turner

The Historical Present

Robert Fagle’s bold solutions to the problem of Virgil

The Aeneid By Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles

Pleasure out of Desperation

Thomas Eakins, yearning for the ideal in a materialistic age

Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins By William S. McFeely

Organized Violence

In the last century, where did warfare end and genocide begin?

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West By Niall Ferguson

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

Ground Truth

A story of dirt, dollars, and death

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippiby Wright Thompson

Insisting on the Positive

A popular historian’s philosophical musings

On Freedomby Timothy Snyder

A Stranger in the Seven Hills

A refugee’s experience in the Eternal City

Roman Year: A Memoirby André Aciman

Mortal Coils

We aren’t alone in facing the inevitable

Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Deathby Susana Monsó

Silent Partner

The union that may have made possible a writer’s late flourishing

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevensonby Camille Peri

Schmaltz of Significance

How the first talkie treated the myth of the melting pot

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singerby Richard Bernstein

● NEWSLETTER

Please enter a valid email address
That address is already in use
The security code entered was incorrect
Thanks for signing up