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 Legacy by Lauren Collins

Verse From the Abyss

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

Paul Celan: A Life by 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 World By 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 World by 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 University By Theo Baker

Things Fall Apart

A meditation on entropy, obsolescence, and death

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

Into the Wilds

The tangled terrain of untrammeled lands

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness By 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 World By Victoria Johnson

Canonical Contempt

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

The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern Biography By Martha Saxton

Our Founding Contradiction

The entrenched dichotomy at the center of the national story

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795by Edward J. Larson

Head of the State

How the FBI’s founding director ruled from the shadows

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Centuryby Beverly Gage

Structural Foundations

The buildings that defined the Western world

The Story of Architectureby Witold Rybczynski

Quark of Habit

Scientists keep pushing for larger particle colliders—but is this really wise?

The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the Worldby Suzie Sheehy

Beauty Born of Ashes

The story of a lyrical masterpiece that almost wasn’t

The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis

To Hell and Back

An Italian master’s unlikely depictions of Dante’s dark vision

Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissanceby Joseph Luzzi

Of Dharma and Doom

A fresh translation revives the ending of an ancient Indian epic

After the War: The Last Books of the MahabharataWendy Doniger

Power of the Peoples

American history was shaped as much by Native Americans as by their colonizers

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

Building Up and Breaking Down

What happens when the structures we erect plunge us into despair?

Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedyby Charlotte Van den Broeck (trans. from the Dutch by David McKay)

Jena-Gadda-Da-Vida

The brief flowering of an intellectual mecca in 1790s Germany

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Selfby Andrea Wulf

● NEWSLETTER

Please enter a valid email address
That address is already in use
The security code entered was incorrect
Thanks for signing up