Excerpts

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

You’re passionate. Purpose-driven. Dreaming big, working hard, making it happen. And now they’ve got you where they want you.

Standardized forensic exams are a useful tool for sexual-violence investigations—or they would be if police departments consistently tested their findings.

How an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

The general’s campaign through the South is known for its brutality against civilians. For the enslaved who followed his army, though, it was a shot at freedom.

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.

A new book traces the rise of the Israel lobby and the challenges it has faced as global criticism of Israel has intensified.

From the pianoforte to the smartphone, each wave of tech has sparked fears of brain rot. But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focusing on.

A new book questions what we think we know about heterosexuality and Latter-day Saints, or Mormons.

What does the Jewish experience in the Revolutionary War say about America?

The connections between the first president’s commitment to agricultural innovation and his evolving attitudes toward his enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon.

Two new biographies enhance our knowledge of John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights hero.

Dinner parties in the capital have long been a path to power, but Perle Mesta had her eye on a different prize.

Michael Boskin’s volume gives a grim account of the state of federalism today.

How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts.

If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.

Her long-unpublished novel was the culmination of a years-long fascination. What does it reveal about her fraught views on civil rights?

The abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Two new books examine how colonial logic has long been embedded within US carceral systems.

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith.

Dismantling it requires getting the story right.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?

Humans love to imagine their own demise.

In every generation, charlatans come along with a plan to make education better by spending less money on schools.

Shaul Magid attempts to show us how much contemporary Jews have inherited from a man most have tried to forget.

A new book by Sarah Archer explores the influence of the Space Race and Cold War on America's midcentury Christmas celebrations.

A sweeping new history chronicles a century of unprecedented economic progress driven by markets and innovation.

A new collection of essays by David Montgomery shows how he used labor history as a means of grappling with the largest questions in American history.

Understanding the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century gives insight into the roots of today’s reactionary activists and policymakers.

Second-wave feminists meant business—but they had a lot of fun at it, too.

A new biography explores the American roots of Meir Kahane's far-right ideology — and how the U.S. Jewish establishment embraced his beliefs.

A new book considers the challenges of controlling the commercialization of college sports.

The story of credit cards is the story of industry versus regulators. Industry won.

The notion of political realignment in the Lone Star State is older than you think. It goes back to Giant, an acidic novel by Edna Ferber.

A history that is as tactical as it is analytical, as global as it is local, and as based in love as it is in politics.

We see what we want to see from philosophers such as Locke not because he wrote for our time (or “all time”) but because we imagine he did.

Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?

LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.

Am 1884 guide to vice and crime by the founder of the world’s largest private detective agency.

James Graham Wilson makes a compelling case that the under-celebrated example of Paul Nitze is both instructive and worthy of our emulation.

A new book revamps Newark's reputation as unsexy, violent, destitute, defiantly declaring it “a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.”

On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has proven itself to be relentlessly unequal.

Susie Orbach’s 1978 book is a fascinating snapshot of diet and physical culture in a very different era.

A recent Otis Redding biography examines what was and what could have been, 50 years after tragedy struck.

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night.

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War.

How politicians used the story of one young patient to neglect the AIDS crisis.

Walter Camp praised the sport as a way to toughen up élite young white men. Despite changes to the game and society, his legacy remains.

Many of today's most influential right-wing tactics and arguments have their roots in 1960s-era college campuses.