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

Where the Sun Never Set

A new, multilayered history of the British Empire

Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906by David Cannadine

Literary Life on the Rocks

A writer’s own ordeal highlights the banal sameness of addiction

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermathby Leslie Jamison

A Planet in Peril

Can humanity engineer its way out of trouble?

The Wizard and the Prophetby Charles C. Mann

A Window on Europe

How a tsar turned a fetid bog into an imperial capital

St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Nevaby Jonathan Miles

A Fallen Angel of Mercy

Did her good works expiate the sins of her dark past?

In Full Flight: A Story of Africa and Atonementby John Heminway

Foes of Judgment

Numbers don’t always reveal the true nature of things

The Tyranny of Metricsby Jerry Z. Muller

An Even Greater Beyond

Will technology bring us eternal life?

Heavens on Earthby Michael Shermer

Why We Need Art

Can evolutionary biology explain the human impulse to create?

The Origins of Creativityby Edward O. Wilson

The Wanderer 

How a Victorian novelist’s life and times inform our own

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global Worldby Maya Jasanoff

Bungle in the Jungle

A new biography considers what might have been in Indochina

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnamby Max Boot

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