Just Looking

What Is It Good For?

How the American military went from defense to offense

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War By Andrew J. Bacevich

Battle of Anacostia

The bonus army and its unexpected legacy

The Bonus Army: An American Epic By Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen

Thoreau’s Landscape Within

How he came to know nature, and through it came to know himself

Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism By David M. Robinson

Rocket Men

A daughter explores the male-dominated universe of her father

Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science By M. G. Lord

The Peculiar Intellectual

In the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South By Michael O’Brien

What Einstein Knew

One year and five papers that changed physics forever

Einstein 1905: The Standard of GreatnessBy John S. Rigden / The Einstein Almanac By Alice Calaprice

One Bad Husband

What the “Bluebeard” story tells us about marriage

Secrets Behind the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives By Maria Tatar

Something That Was Us

Living It

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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