Democracy in Three Dimensions?

How the nation’s capital rose from a fetid forest on the backs of slaves

Washington: The Making of the American Capital By Fergus M. Bordewich

Ireland Revised

Where the Celtic Tiger came from, and where it has gone

Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000 By R. F. Foster

Repatriating Art

A museum director examines the controversy over whether nations own their cultural artifacts

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage By James Cuno

A Look Beyond the Tragic Mystique

Posthumous Keats By Stanley Plumly

The Art of Doing

Let’s give our hands a great big hand

The Craftsman By Richard Sennett

A Dangerous Weapon

The fault is not in the camera, but in ourselves

The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America By Louis P. Masur

Drought and Famine

What the past teaches us to fear most about global climate change

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations By Brian Fagan

Sleepless Nights

Getting cranky about the things that keep us awake

Insomniac By Gayle Greene

The Case of the Defective Detective

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective By Kate Summerscale

Enlightenment Lite

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India By Deborah Baker

Bending Toward Justice

Rejecting the “race riot” myth means facing the ugly truth

They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacyby Lauren Collins

Verse From the Abyss

How a Jewish poet rebuilt his mother tongue in the wake of the Holocaust

Paul Celan: A Lifeby Anna Arno, translated by Soren Gauger

Where Are We?

Finding our bearings has never been so risky

Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern WorldBy Katherine Dunn

Blood—and Beauty—at the Root

Fifty years ago, Alex Haley’s landmark novel changed the way many Americans thought about race

Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the Worldby Lucas L. Johnson II

In Defense of Difficult Reading

The tomes of the past cultivate the lost art of sustained attention

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) Naomi Kanakia

Inside Man

A young reporter’s devastating exposé of the amoral elite

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford UniversityBy Theo Baker

Things Fall Apart

A meditation on entropy, obsolescence, and death

How We Disappear: A Personal History of InformationBy Thomas S. Mullaney

Into the Wilds

The tangled terrain of untrammeled lands

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the WildernessBy Cal Flyn

The Painter Time Forgot

An overdue reckoning of an artist’s volcanic genius

Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the WorldBy Victoria Johnson

Canonical Contempt

Even in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon’s misogyny set him apart

The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern BiographyBy Martha Saxton

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