Ebola Facts Are Scary Enough
This book, like most writing about Ebola, is deeply unsettling, but it’s also sober minded, and in this respect, a standout in the floodlet of Ebola books, many of...
How the Media Protects Obama
Now that she’s no longer on the CBS payroll, this pit bull is off the leash and tearing flesh off the behinds of senior media and government officials. In her...
Boris on Winston
The element of self-identification in Johnson’s project is too obvious to ignore. Here is a maverick Tory politician, endowed in equal measure with fierce...
How Do We Get Good Government?
The historian Arnold Toynbee once remarked that the past is "a chaos unamenable to...laws." Fukuyama has, thankfully, ignored that adage. While his modesty prevents him...
Schocking Indictment on Afghanistan
Afghanistan is not an easy place for in-depth reporting. Foreign civilians have been targets, even in the safer areas, since 2001, when the first Spanish journalists...
American Capitalism Created the Computational Revolution
Walter Isaacson is one of our greatest biographers. He has written three superb portraits of men who in large measure defined their age—Benjamin Franklin, Albert...
The Second Machine Age
Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine Age talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book, co-authored with Andrew McAfee. He...
Christianity and Classical Culture
Christianity and Classical Culture is considered one of the great works of scholarship published in the last century. The theme of Christianity and Classical Culture is ...
Revenge of the Periphery
Douglas Porch, a Distinguished Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, has written a highly polemical critical intellectual history of...
Updating a Chronicle of Suffering
When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa began to escalate a few months ago, the writer Richard Preston was working on a children’s fantasy novel. He dropped that...
The Last Founding Father
Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound,...
Renaissance Man or Charlatan?
The book is ostensibly a call for revolution, even if it doesn’t offer much in the way of concrete political actions Brand would endorse or execute himself....
Biting the Invisible Hand
If you go to a bookstore, you’ll find an abundance of books deploring the very nature of capitalism. Hence, it’s a pleasure to find one author who will buck...
The Reinvention of Sex
The story of four “brave, rebellious misfits,” “The Birth of the Pill” brims with fascinating detail, such as the forgotten fact that Prescott Bush—father and...
A Man in Full
That diary is a principal reason why Fred Kaplan’s biography is so big, thorough, and so rich in quotes from the most primary of sources. Since the rest of the...
Bliss in That Dawn to Be Alive
With the strain of romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, Isaacson equates the postwar era with Wordsworth’s description of...
New Old-Fashioned Grammar
Surprisingly, British people have been snapping up copies of a book that heaps scorn on the education most of them received.
Pictures of Space Through Time
Graphic images need not be mere illustrations of concepts described in texts or equations; they can be an important form of knowledge in their own right.
'The Bell Curve' Turns 20
This month marks two decades since the publication of The Bell Curve, the massive--and massively controversial--ode to intelligence testing from Harvard psychology...
Gummit Don't Work Good
Gummit don’t work good. That conclusion, often that inelegantly expressed, seems to be more and more common, not only in the United States but around the world. It is...
Leon Panetta Blows the Whistle
In clear and unequivocal terms, former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta confirms precisely what conservative critics, lawmakers, former officials,...
Enough with Dystopias
Stephenson called for a wave of technological optimism in science fiction. Hieroglyph is meant to be the flagship for this new direction for SF.
How (and How Not) to Apologize
Public apologies are like currencies: The more they’re issued, the less they’re worth. Nearly every day, another famous offender expresses the deepest of regret for...
New York Literally Invented Nightlife
Nightlife—the nightlife that Americans know now, with dark restaurants and dance floors—did not exist until the 1920s. It's not that people didn't go out at...
