A Novel That Shows the Dark Side of Utopia
Gabriel Bump’s new book examines the human impulse to build new societies—and to destroy them.
Book Review
A Masterful Depiction of Male Cruelty
For decades, Claire Keegan has been exploring the shabby way the world treats women.
What the Gig Economy Does to a Human
In an age of precarious labor, not every life amounts to a satisfying story.
A Redacted Past Slowly Emerges
This year’s winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, Justin Torres’s Blackouts is a complex story about recovering the history of erased and ignored gay lives.
The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated
James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?
The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock
A new book examines why the director was so stringent with—and sometimes even sadistic toward—his female leads.
The Tech That’s Radically Reimagining the Public Sphere
In her new book about facial recognition, Kashmir Hill shows how our expectations of privacy have been rewritten over the past few years.
Who Made the Oxford English Dictionary?
A new book gives life to one of the world’s greatest crowdsourcing efforts.
What Madonna Knows
The artist is always one step ahead—and has a unique power to scandalize each generation anew.
Comedians Only Care About Comedy
A new book cured me of any attachment to the idea of the stand-up as truth-telling philosophe.