Tag: Books

Watergate revealed that multinational corporations, including some of the most prestigious American brands, had been making bribes to politicians not only at home but in foreign countries.

Insomnia is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

In this month’s books newsletter, you’re going to get tired of winning.

In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.

Howard Hughes used gossip, spies and money to control Hollywood’s women for nearly 60 years. Karina Longworth critically examines the Golden Age’s gossip to stop his false narratives from becoming our history.

Telling Washington’s story without erasing the people and lands that preoccupied him leads to important new questions; like, just how consequential for American history was the first president’s addiction to land speculation?

Glory Edim talks about editing her new anthology, the push for equity in publishing, and how black women writers have written themselves into spaces that neglect or ignore them.

Nic and his father David Sheff’s memoirs about grappling with Nic’s addiction are the basis for the new movie ‘Beautiful Boy.’ It was important to them that the movie communicate what addiction really is — an illness.

Were early horror films, with their long, angry processions of the undead, repeating the mass trauma of the First World War, or foreshadowing the coming of the Second?

In the “bizarre and horrifying world” of the early modern Caribbean, maroons and pirates both prized their freedom above all else. And sometimes they worked together to safeguard it.

The Strand, New York City’s largest independent bookstore, is owned by a millionaire — and the booksellers who work there are all broke.

When accompanying his father to the emergency room, a writer reflects on how he developed his talent — and why that’s a story he can never tell his father.

“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.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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