Bugging Out

The buzzing, crawling creatures we would be lost without

The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World by Edward Melillo

Creeping Illiberalism

A bleak account of the West’s slide toward tyranny

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

Beyond Classification

One writer’s journey into the labyrinth of political and bureaucratic obfuscation

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker

How We Came Together

America purchased its sense of itself at a high price

Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard

A Lifelong Habit of Being

Exploring a fundamentally ambiguous attribute

Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession by Marjorie Garber

Our Feathered Friends

They aren’t the intellectual lightweights we take them for

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman

The People’s Gallery

A collection that is the brightest light in a city full of them

The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum by James Gardner

Mysterious Inheritance

A new biography of the founder of population genetics

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane by Samanth Subramanian

Feminism’s First Think Tank

The very different women of the Radcliffe Institute’s inaugural class

The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s Maggie Doherty

Plane silhouetted against clouds

The Beauty of Fluid Motion

How the future became fashionable

Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion by Vanessa R. Schwartz

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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