Man of the World

Well-traveled and erudite, John Quincy Adams sometimes had trouble appealing to his countrymen

John Quincy Adams: American Visionary By Fred Kaplan

The Skeptic

A critic’s cranky charm

A Literary Education and Other Essays By Joseph Epstein

Inside the Box

How we became pod people

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace By Nikil Saval

Numbers Game

The problems of solutions

Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World By Amir Alexander

Dangerous Liaison

A CIA officer’s many faces

The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames By Kai Bird

We, Not Me

A writer feels our pain

The Empathy Exams By Leslie Jamison

Beyond the Colonies

What else happened during the year of independence?

West of the Revolution By Claudio Saunt

Matters of Perception

Sometimes the truth lies more in what we perceive than what we think

Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes By Vicki McCabe

The Bard of Suburbia

John Updike’s obsession with ordinary life made him the writer by whom we came to know ourselves

Updike By Adam Begley

19th Nervous Breakdown

The struggle to keep it together

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind By Scott Stossel

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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