When Ideas Mattered

How “freedom from” became “freedom to”

THE FREE WORLD: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

Seconds from Midnight

Busting the myth that skilled diplomacy saved the world

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy

Swimming the River of Song

How a young scholar demystified the ancient oral tradition

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry by Robert Kanigel

Surviving the Anthropocene

Can we reverse-engineer our way out of catastrophe?

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

TV’s Founding Mothers

The women who turned the small screen into a cultural phenomenon

When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

The celebrated depiction of a miracle is, by its very survival, a miracle in itself

Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman

Artist of Excess

The man who painted his century’s nightmare

Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

Order Amid Chaos

A poet-scientist considers the imponderables of existence

Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings by Alan Lightman

Cultural or Criminal?

How to explain Texas’s hunger for executions

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty by Maurice Chammah

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

Who Would I Be Off My Meds

Can weaning oneself off pharmaceuticals ease the cycle of perpetual suffering?

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistanceby Laura Delano

Who’s to Say?
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A bewildering take from a noted scholar of Christianity

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesusby Elaine Pagels

Chapters and Verse

Looking for the poet between the lines

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetryby Adam Plunkett

Once More, Without Feeling

Can a memoir be effective when it lacks any warmth?

Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritanceby Joe Dunthorne

Electrons That Bind

The molecule at the center of everything

Carbon: The Book of Lifeby Paul Hawken

Food for Thought

A pragmatic approach to one of humanity’s gravest threats

How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Foodby Vaclav Smil

Splitting Our Sides

A new biography of a comedy pioneer

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Liveby Susan Morrison

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equationby Kenneth Turan

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

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

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