Satirist to the Galaxy

The war behind a writer’s words

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

Indefensible Torture, Unfree Speech

What Censorship Kept America from Learning about the Futility of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”

The Black Banners Declassified: How Torture Derailed the War on Terror after 9/11  by Ali Soufan with Daniel Freedman

Black America’s Tough-Minded Truth Teller

How an autobiography shaped the image of a civil rights icon

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

A Pioneering Appetite

The story of America’s first culinary celebrity

The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard John Birdsall

Verifiable Truths

The thinkers who tried to strip metaphysics from philosophy

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle David Edmonds

Saved By Accident

Only dumb luck has stood in the way of atomic annihilation

Gambling With Armageddon by Martin J. Sherwin

Sonic Geographer

The composer whose music bears witness to a planet in peril

Admired and Abhorred

The German composer whose legacy continues to confound

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music Alex Ross

Beneath the Powdered Wig

Reinterpreting the life of our trendiest Founding Father

Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons From a Misunderstood Founder by Christian Parenti

Varieties of Experience

Culture rewires our brains and shapes how we think

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich by Joseph Henrich

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

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

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

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