By Jacqui Banaszynski Four long-time friends stopped for a lunch at an old-style diner in the rural ex-urbs of Philadelphia. We hadn’t all been together since before COVID and were fully absorbed with catching up. But we were barely … Read more
By Katia Savchuk David Grann believes that scouting an idea for a book or magazine article should be more than an intellectual exercise. The right story, he says, “gets its hooks into you.” The tales that grip Grann, a … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of two posts featuring Kim Cross on the successful pitch-and-proposal process that led to her new book, ‘In Light of All Darkness.’ In a companion post, Cross annotates the … Read more
By Andrea Pitzer Is it possible to tell the story of Auschwitz, the abyss at the center of the twentieth century? When I wrote “One Long Night,” a history of concentration camps around the world, my central question … Read more
The Queen is dead. Long live the King. OK, that may be the most predictable line I’ve ever written, but a version of it has been working for the Brits for, what, about 1,100 years … Read more
As abortion rights in the United States grew more and more tenuous this summer, Los Angeles Times reporter Brittny Mejia grew curious about the history of those rights. That led her to uncover a pivotal court … Read more
How’s this for a story? At the start of a bloody war that shocked the world, a ship braved Antarctic ice and sailors risked their lives, returning with a tale for the ages. That’s the story of Ernest Shackleton … Read more
Last week, Sen. Mitt Romney called for preserving evidence of the destruction caused by the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol “so that 150 years from now, as people tour the building, they’ll say, ‘Ah, this was … Read more
Worthy books are released almost every day. No doubt more than a few authors bemoaned the publication of their hard work this past year, when so much of the world’s attention was distracted by a lethal pandemic and lethal … Read more
“Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” So begins Nikole Hannah-Jones’s stunning and provocative essay that … Read more