In hip-hop and skateboarding, one young man finds an outlet for his aggression.

“Winners Take All” is an indictment of the insular, Disneyfied world of Ted Talks, “thought leaders” and philanthropy as self-help for rich people. But does it go far enough?

“It was important to me that the ‘villains’ in the book were ordinary people, because readers are ordinary people, and people who do terrible things are often ordinary people.”

A lot of what you’ll read in this month’s books newsletter is about things not seeming to be what they really are.

Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.

“’I’m good,’ I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day.”

Her father’s gender transition was the impetus behind Jill Soloway’s show.

Memoirist Tanya Marquardt talks about consent, trauma, and investigating our memories in the age of #MeToo.

What does incarceration do for the member of a family that views prison as a rite of passage? A New York Times reporter takes a close look at intergenerational criminality.

One of the first decisions any tourist had to make when crossing the German border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to “Heil Hitler.”

What’s so great about having things spelled out clearly?

“I think when I found film,” he said, “I found a way — I still hide a bit — but a way to not hide as much. I felt like I could put these things into the work because it’s the movie. It’s not me.”

In two recent books about immigrant families seeking asylum in the U.S., the authors’ attempts to help become part of their subjects’ stories.

When Eleanor takes a break from reading the news, her laptop goes missing. Full of self-abnegation, she asks Wallace Shawn for advice.

Cora Harrington’s first book, In Intimate Detail, is an accessible, inclusive guide to undergarments.

Rebecca Traister talks about the revolutionary power of women’s anger.

Nicole Chung wants white parents of transracial adoptees to grapple more candidly with the reality of racism in America.

In an excerpt from her new memoir, ‘All You Can Ever Know,’ transracial adoptee Nicole Chung recounts how her parents came to adopt her.

I interviewed everyone present in the tactical operations center during a routine airstrike in Helmand Province. Without exception they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

And how many times can you start your life all over again from zero? If there’s anyone who knows the answer, it’s Claudia Amaro.

In “Night Moves,” Jessica Hopper is 80% on her bike and 20% at a show, memorializing a young adulthood spent in just one of “a million Chicagos” — but one that shaped a wide network of artists and writers.

Imagining an economy based in environmental reality

A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. This, I believed, was the optimal, and probably only, condition under which art could be made.

An infirmed Friedrich Nietzsche hiked the Swiss Alps to work on his writing. Philosopher John Kaag followed Nietzsche’s trail, taking the great thinker’s ideas out of his books and into the world.

Author Tim Mohr talks about East Germany’s dissident punk rock scene, and its role in bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 — the story behind his remarkable new book, ‘Burning Down The Haus.’

We must speak truth to the power of all that threatens to keep women and girls silent in the face of sexual violence.

New books about the opioid crisis — “Dopesick,” “Fight for Space” and “American Fix” — have different ideas about who’s to blame and what to do next. Our critic says regulating supply can have deadly consequences, and we need to address users’ pain.

Eli Saslow says the push and pull of resistance (from angry classmates) and civil discourse (with others willing to be kind to him) is what changed Derek Black.

One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was the willful misleading of children. Superheroes, he thought, were the worst culprits.

The author of “Heartland,” a National Book Award longlisted memoir about growing up poor in rural America, gives her views on politics, identity, and cultural appropriation.