The Casserole Inquisition

Chronicles from America’s culinary transformation

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food By Judith Jones

Wry Eye on the Bard

Sorting through the little we know about the best we’ve got

Shakespeare: The World as Stage By Bill Bryson

Latin’s Eminent Career

Is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler

A Long Walk in the New World

Of 300 Spaniards sent to settle Florida, only four survived

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca By Andrés Reséndez

The Genius and Her Sanctuary

Pivotal moments in the pairing of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice By Janet Malcolm

Atonality and Beyond

The century when composers and audiences parted company

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Early End of Consensus

Bitter partisanship began soon after George Washington left the scene

A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign By Edward J. Larson

Swept Away

When Géricault painted The Raft of the Medusa, he immersed himself in his subject’s horrors

The Wreck of the Medusa By Jonathan Miles

Nurtural Intelligence

The discoverer of the Flynn effect claims that genes control IQ less than you’d expect

What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect By James R. Flynn

Words and Music

Two ways of thinking about what our brains can do

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human NatureBy Steven Pinker / Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks

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

Where Are We?

Finding our bearings has never been so risky

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

Canonical Contempt

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

The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern BiographyBy Martha Saxton

Books Are a Star’s Best Friend

The little-known reading habits of a Hollywood icon

Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroeby Gail Crowther

Who Is Thinking?

The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question

A World Appears: A Journey into ConsciousnessBy Michael Pollan

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