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    A Sordid Tale of Birds, Bees and Bureaucracies

    Fascist Italy believed sex education ‘sapped the virility’ of the nation. Postwar Sweden encouraged it to limit the size of families.

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    The United States of Secrets

    The U.S. government is the most open in the history of the world—but it still keeps far too many things secret.

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    Bikinis—Not Burqas—for the Middle East

    Everyone should know the name of Genet Girma, who wore a placard on her wedding reading: ‘I am not circumcised, learn from me.’

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    Naked Horse Rides, Ruby-Dyed Pigeons and Gertrude Stein: A Typical Day at One Country House

    At the Oxfordshire house owned by British aesthete and composer Lord Berners, Salvador Dalí and Wallis Simpson—were amused by the freakish and the kitsch.

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    Book Review: ‘The Great Divide’ by Joseph E. Stiglitz

    The past half century has seen the creation of the modern welfare state, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s not enough for Joseph Stiglitz.

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    Why California’s Water Wars Will Never End

    Ranchers and farmers saw the L.A. aqueduct as tantamount to theft. Yet someone had to give up water so that Angelenos might drink.

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    The Plague of Campus Rape

    Jordan Johnson surely would have been expelled had he not been a football hero in a football-crazed town.

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    Poems That Make Your Skin Bristle

    April is Poetry Month—and a good time to celebrate one of our finest exponents of strict form, elegant diction and clear thought.

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    Metropolitan Moneyball

    After Alderson became Mets GM, the owners started slashing payroll. They had lost more to Bernie Madoff than anyone knew.

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    The Best Table in Hollywood

    ‘Apollo 13’ grew out of conversations with the mission’s commander. Chats with hip-hop stars led Brian Grazer to produce ‘Empire.’

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    Iraq’s Unlikely Eulogist

    There was no more improbable duo than Odierno, the hulking general with a shaved head, and his petite English adviser.

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    The Robot Will See You Now

    One patient nearly died after being prescribed 38½ tablets of an antibiotic. Neither doctor nor pharmacist detected the computer error.

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    Candice Bergen’s Appetite For Life

    Being beautiful was a mixed blessing for the actress: She got parts she didn’t deserve and men who didn’t deserve her.

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    Her Father’s Daughter

    Dancing on Jimmy Fallon isn’t the source of the first lady’s popularity. It’s her upbringing in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago.

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    Silicon Valley Star Search

    Google spends twice as much on recruiting than the average company, even though it gets two million applicants a year.

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    He Made Them Millionaires

    It’s Opening Day—and the most significant figure in modern baseball history is still being kept out of the Hall of Fame.

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    All the President’s Men

    Toward the end of Washington’s first term, Jefferson told him Hamilton was a dangerous man whose policies corrupted the government.

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    Playing Dumb in Palestine

    Presenting himself as Tobi the German, the author hears praise of Nazis in the West Bank and talk of Jews’ ‘racist’ DNA in Tel Aviv.

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    Cancer’s Holy Grail

    If we can replicate the gene’s targeted killing of malign cells, there is the potential to prevent cancer and find new therapies.

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    Concrete Jungle Dreams

    The Bronx, now synonymous with poverty and crime, has also produced the likes of Al Pacino, Colin Powell and Daniel Libeskind.

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    Constitutional Revolution

    A study of how the Federalist Society helped to revive and spread the originalist view of the Constitution.

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    Going Off the Pills

    One in four American women takes psychiatric medication. Are we ill, or are we treating emotions like a disease?

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    Stalin’s Man In Spain

    ‘Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind,’ Carrillo told his father, a Socialist party member, in 1939.

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    License To Kill

    Imagine a future in which a competitor assassinates you via a robotic spider. That’s one way to see new technology’s potential.

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    Don’t Mention the War

    Historians played down the Nazi genocide and exalted ‘German’ resistance to Hitler—it was part of a national survival strategy.

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    Talismans Of Vitality

    A normal diet provides most of the nutrients the body requires. We don’t need health supplements yet knock them back with gusto.

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    Flight to Freedom

    No Kum Sok pretended to love the Great Leader and got into flight school. Then he flew his MiG to South Korea and defected.

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    The Hard Questions

    A mature democracy needs to carefully balance individual privacy, national security and business efficiency.

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    High Voltage

    The Energizer battery was a close descendant of a rechargeable lead-acid one invented in 1859. The science had barely changed.

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    Bootstraps Aren’t Enough

    By the time they start kindergarten, children from professional families hear 19 million more words than working-class kids.

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    A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothes

    Germany, rather than using its power to impose a political vision on the rest of Europe, has been content to free ride on its allies.

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    Psychiatry and Its Discontents

    Once, psychiatrists relied on Freud. Now, they rely on pharmaceuticals. It’s always easier to see the follies of the past than our own.

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    The Battle of Ann Arbor

    A philosophy professor’s belief in colorblind law led him to oppose the university’s use of affirmative action in admissions decisions.

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    Into Darkness

    Taken for slave labor from the lines that led to the ovens at Auschwitz, he travels through the infernal archipelago of the work camps.

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    We Built That

    Nucor, one of the world’s most profitable steel companies, hasn’t laid off an employee in 42 years in the business. What’s its secret?

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    Kazuo Ishiguro: Quintessentially British

    Like T.H. White before him, Ishiguro sees the central theme of the Arthurian myths as the search for an antidote for war.

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    Paranoia Strikes Deep

    After the French Revolution, European rulers adopted brutal policies that often triggered the uprisings they were intended to prevent.

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    Panda Hugger Turned Slugger

    For years, Pillsbury’s view fit the Washington consensus: China, with the help of the U.S., would become a peaceful power. No longer.

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    Lured by Literature

    So intoxicated in 1968 by the counterculture’s energies, Dickstein suggests adding ‘The Story of O’ to Columbia’s core curriculum.

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    Capitol Hill Pickpockets

    Risky loans made by Fannie and Freddie were the biggest factor that led to the financial crisis—and the direct result of federal policy.

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    Two Heads Are Better Than One

    The brain is organized as modules and circuits for specialized actions. The scientist who figured that out reflects on his discovery.

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    The Reader on the Prowl

    Even the smartphone-toting, text-messaging generation prefers to study using real books. It makes things easier to remember.

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    The Problem of Privilege

    If you’re reading this book (or this review), the correct answer to that most awkward of questions—‘Are we rich?’—is ‘yes.’

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    Camelot Chicanery

    Fearful of losing Southern votes, JFK was cool to the civil-rights movement until Bull Connor’s hoses and dogs forced him to act.

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    Slumdog Millionaires

    A colorful range of everyday entrepreneurs disprove the notion that India is simply a ‘socialist country in which the state is the key.’

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    Tsar Power

    To understand Putin’s power, it is essential to consider the millions of Russians who have molded him ‘into a sort of sacred king.’

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    Scofflaws in the White House

    Since the Cold War, championship of international law—not opposition to it—is the novel departure.

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    The Handmaid’s Tale

    Barbra Streisand tells Axelrod that the president needs to talk to people in simpler terms: ‘I hate to say it, but people are stupid.’

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    A Deficit Hawk Spots His Prey

    A billionaire argues that the rich should pay more in taxes, but their wealth may do more for the country than government spending.

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    Fire Up Your Batteries

    In 1905, a magazine called Horseless Age warned that the fuel supply was limited and ‘farseeing men’ should look for alternatives.

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    Stoking the Prairie Fire

    How did Ronald Reagan, a conciliatory and often passive person, achieve such heights? One insider says the answer was Nancy.

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    Crime and Punishment

    Corporations are paying record fines for breaking ever more complex laws. Critics, though, want to see executives in the dock.

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    Robbed by the Kremlin

    For years, Bill Browder was a winner in Russia’s markets. Then he was expelled from the country and his lawyer was murdered.

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    Raw Materials for War

    In 1909, a best-seller argued that financial interdependence made war self-defeating. A century of global conflict followed.

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    A Pawn of the Mullahs

    In 1992, Nazila Fathi was working as a fixer for Western journalists when she was approached about keeping an eye on ‘suspicious’ reporters.

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    The Great Man in Eclipse

    The elderly Tolstoy fell under the sway of an unscrupulous acolyte intent on fully controlling the man he claimed to be serving.

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    For Gail Godwin, the Prose Was the Easy Part

    Part of being a writer is the constant effort to find talented confederates within an unstable, commercially driven industry.

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    The Men Who Killed the King

    Many of King Charles I’s killers were captured by former allies who needed to prove their own conveniently rediscovered royalism.

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    When America Paid Its Debts

    For Andrew Jackson and many other early Americans, debt was not just a fiscal danger, but a path to corruption and national decline.

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    Public Unions vs. the Public

    Pension and benefit obligations weigh down our cities. Trash disposal in Chicago costs $231 per ton, versus $74 in non-union Dallas.

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    Among the Guerillas

    Frank Scotton’s curiosity about all things Vietnamese got him into risky situations—including shootouts with local Viet Cong.

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    Economic History Repeating

    In the 1920s, electrification spurred a faith in rising productivity, fooling regulators. The same thing happened with the Web.

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    Doctor Android

    In the same way that Luther challenged the Catholic Church, smartphones are poised to upend the medical profession.

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    Press Enter for Ecstasy

    Chemists all over the planet send their recipes to Chinese factories that make the drugs and ship them by airfreight to avoid detection.

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    A Top-Notch Middlebrow

    Will Durant’s books made clear that history was our story: Caesar’s heart thrilled to ambitions and adventures that move us today.

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    The Victorian Fight Against Filth

    Mud was ubiquitous on London’s streets during Victoria’s reign, and the battle against pollution was never-ending.

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    Oliver Sacks, Power-Lifter

    As a motorcycle-loving young doctor, Oliver Sacks descended into loneliness and drug addiction. The wild energies were tamed by swimming and book-writing.

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    Orson Welles: A Genius With a Grasshopper Mind

    Orson Welles struggled to make a film about a filmmaker who is struggling to make a film.

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    Raising the Baa

    Wordsworth and Coleridge have nothing on the native son of the Lake District who tends sheep and also writes like a dream.

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    A Patchwork Occupation

    With the Northern public eager to ‘bring the boys home,’ the federal forces occupying the South were reduced from 200,000 in 1865 to a mere 28,000 at the end of 1866.

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    Science Fiction: The War Between the Social Networks

    Who needs a state, once we have perfectly sorted social networks?

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    Distaff Scientists

    Is it wrong to be captivated by a great thinker’s personality, rather than the drier stuff of résumés?

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    The Half-Life of Physicists

    In 1947 Erwin Schrödinger boasted of a big new result that would beat his sometime collaborator Albert Einstein. They were both wrong.

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    Kate Atkinson’s New Novel Celebrates the Greatest Generation

    A novel unorthodox in structure but extremely traditional in its admiration for the ‘greatest generation.’

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    Five Best: Sally McMillen

    The author of ‘Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life’ recommends biographies of notable first ladies.

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    Why Do So Many Kids’ Books Have Such Poor Grammar?

    The grammar in too many children’s books is surprisingly careless.

  • April 25

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    The Definitive History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

    By 1934, with all of the Nazis’ enemies defeated or intimidated, concentration had lost its original purpose. But Himmler was ready with a new rationale: The camps could serve as a tool to improve the German race.

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    What Does a President Owe to God?

    These days a president’s true beliefs and convictions are obscured by anodyne, ecumenical rhetoric.

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    Nuclear Neighbors’ Tug of War

    For Mohammed Ali Jinnah. partition was a triumph. For his longtime rival, Gandhi, it was a ‘spiritual tragedy.’

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    Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Latest ‘Struggle’

    The narrator admires the way that rock musicians live on the edge; it’s the way he wants to live too.

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    Mark Rothko’s Jewish Paintings

    ‘The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,’ the painter said.

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    The Soul (Music) of the South

    Musicians, black or white, needed to be versatile. Getting a gig often trumped personal attitudes.

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    Owl Love Is Here to Stay

    Holding a great gray owl is ‘similar to holding a big down pillow with a fresh sweet potato in the middle.’

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    America’s Concentration Camps

    About 70% of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans held were citizens. Some 2,300 would fight for their country.

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    Five Best: Jonathan Schneer

    The author of “Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet” recommends books about the men who helped win World War II.

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    Larry Kramer: Still Acting Up

    Readers ‘are just going to have to get used to the frank language of bodily functions,’ Kramer warns.

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    The Best New Children’s Books

    Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews Joohee Yoon’s “Beastly Verse”; Kenneth Kraegel’s “The Song of Delphine”; Eve Bunting’s “Yard Sale” and Bimba Landmann’s “Just for Today.”

  • April 18

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    Eastern Approaches

    Hank Paulson uses careful language that will not bother the Chinese censors unduly when they prepare the mainland edition of this book.

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    A Pestilence of Bombs

    As the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, American radicals turned into violent revolutionaries.

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    Parents Without Borders

    The best travel writing offers unexpected twists and rewarding epiphanies, not just a march down a checklist of peak experiences.

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    Revenge for Pearl Harbor

    When their bombers reached Tokyo, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his men found that the Japanese were a lot weaker than they appeared.

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    The Lion of Carthage

    What Hannibal could not overcome was the Roman willingness to sustain mass casualties and raise new legions.

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    The Boy Torturer

    A little over a month after Jesse Pomeroy was released from reformatory, 10-year-old Katie Curran disappeared.

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    Dairy Straits

    The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 40% of the grain for America’s grain-fed beef, may run dry within decades.

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    Good Things in Small Packages

    Seeds are one of the vegetal kingdom’s most wondrous inventions. A 2,000-year-old date found in the ruins of Masada in Israel sprouted into a 10-foot-tall palm tree.

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    Tales of Old China

    As Japanese invaders swept across China in 1938, a wealthy scholar and landowner secretly buried a cache of precious porcelain.

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    The Deliberate Message of Toni Morrison

    Parents unwittingly pass hatred to their children, thereby ‘reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over.’

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    Children’s Books: Chapter and Verse

    Poetic forms can describe particular things—a hat, a moment in time—or epic stories like Noah’s Flood.

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    Five Best: Terry Alford

    The author of “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” recommends books about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

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    Mysteries: Men at Work

    A former police officer solves mysteries by ‘knitting backwards’ and unraveling the strands of a crime.

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    Spring Books

    Click here for full illustration by Michael Crampton

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    The Riches of the Amazon

    In the 1840s, amassing plants, birds and insects was both a scientific and
    a commercial adventure.

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    150 Years of Bike Lane Battles

    After the war, only children rode bikes, so bikes became a symbol of childhood.

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    For Presidents, A Really Nice Prison

    Among White House staff’s daunting tasks: increasing LBJ’s water pressure, dusting Nancy Reagan’s Limoges boxes, searching for Caroline Kennedy’s lost hamsters.

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    Science Books That Made Modernity

    Darwin’s radical ideas were accepted surprisingly quickly by an English public already steeped in science.

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    The World Is Not Enough

    In 2065, will we be mining asteroids and the moon? Not if we are still using rocket technology from 1965.

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    Chasing Happiness

    ‘No one will be happy if tormented by the thought of someone else who is happier,’ Seneca said.

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    A Brief Tour of Bedlam

    One prominent cure kept patients in bed for months, force-fed a high-calorie diet and denied any occupation.

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    A Soleful Life

    The author was wearing lizard-skin boots when Schwarzenegger, dressed in a powder blue cowboy suit, hit on her.

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    Shakespeare’s Women

    Did a life-changing love affair with a ‘Dark Lady’ help Shakespeare create Juliet, Portia and Viola?

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    A Sage for All Seasons

    A 2,600-year-old sage remains the most important source of ideas about government in East Asia.

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    Understanding the Nazis

    Every generation of scholars brings its own priorities and politics to the puzzle of the Third Reich. The best historians permit readers to make their own moral judgments.

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    The Windsors’ Worst-Kept Secret

    The endless intrigues of the former king and his new wife, Wallis Simpson, tormented George VI. But was it treason?

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    The Look of La-La Land

    In the 1950s, Los Angeles had fewer museums, galleries and collectors, but it also lacked any of the ‘existential angst that was de rigueur among New York intellectuals.’

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    Knocking Them Out of the Park

    Writers fawn over athletes far more than they ought to. Stars like Ted Williams rarely returned the favor.

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    The Very Thought of Hue

    Early color films gave viewers headaches. It took decades to develop a process that didn’t simply look odd.

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    Memphis Blues

    Proceeds from the city’s brothels, gambling parlors and jazz dens helped to fund civil-rights pioneers.

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    Wares and the Wanderer

    Jewish peddlers in the New World sold everything from eyeglasses and soup ladles to buttons and bathtubs.

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    Medical Miracles

    Children who are the victims of their parents’ misplaced faith.

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    The Singing Saints

    The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has performed at Mount Rushmore and in five presidential inaugurations. Jimmy Stewart, Snoopy and Donald Duck have all wielded the conductor’s baton.

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    Horrified by Wonder Bread

    Restaurant Nora was the noshing spot for D.C.’s elite. It served ‘hippie food,’ but never made a big deal of it.

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    No Kidding

    A memoir by a darkly funny New Yorker cartoonist whose principal struggle in childhood was being a child.

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    All Along the Grand Trunk Road

    The murderous devotees of the goddess Kali known as Thugs have inspired many novels set in the Raj.

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    When Billy and Johnny Got Back

    A left-handed penmanship competition in 1866 drew hundreds of veterans who had lost their right arms.

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    Mr. Bellow’s Planet

    Saul Bellow loved to juxtapose the highbrow and the lowbrow. But the low
    was his natural register.

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    Fiction: An Entrancing Modern-Day Legend

    A gnomic prophecy suggests that Ikenna will die at his brothers’ hands. This vision is the family’s undoing.

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    Children’s Books: Skylines and Cityscapes

    Charming introductions to math, language and the great wide world: Pedagogy matched with beauty.

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    Five Best: Sofka Zinovieff

    The author of ‘The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me’ recommends books about memorable aristocrats.

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    Science Fiction: Quantum Crime Capers

    A physicist realizes that the universe is a quantum computer and discovers that some of it is sentient.

  • April 4

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    Billy the Id

    Billy Martin got drunk, insulted the Yankees’ owner, kicked dirt at umpires, flaunted his mistress at the ballpark, failed to pay his taxes and got into dugout and barroom brawls.

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    An Organizer for Victory

    Nicolas Nabokov recognized that communism’s attraction for intellectuals and artists grew out of discontent with their own culture.

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    The Miracle of the Heavens

    Within two short years of the telescope’s invention, Galileo had forever altered our place in the cosmos.

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    St. Louis Bore Him

    T.S. Eliot was a ‘shy, sometimes naïve and vulnerable’ young man whose poetry—particularly ‘The Waste Land’—was shaped by the suffering of his early adult years.

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    Per Petterson Sings the Same Old Song

    “I Refuse”—the follow-up to the best-selling “Out Stealing Horses”—takes us back into his world of obstinate man-boy heroes who refuse to accept the identities that society imposes on them.

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    Acts of God in the Caribbean

    Since Columbus’s time, roughly 4,000 to 5,000 hurricanes have roared through the Caribbean.

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    Who Killed Patrice Lumumba?

    At issue was Belgian pride, Cold War politics and the hubris of the United Nations—and vast mineral wealth.

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    The Ghosts of Lady Day

    Can we dissociate Billie Holiday the performer from the turbulence that we know of her life?

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    Blissed Out

    Does human rationality separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom? Or is it our love of getting high?

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    Slippery Slopes

    When two Yosemite hardmen stumble across a Russian climber, barely alive, they debate whether or not they have to save him.

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    Five Best: Esther Freud

    The author of, most recently, “Mr. Mac and Me” recommends novels about artists.

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    Fiction Chronicle: Apocalypse Then

    Vietnam ‘was the first war where the losers would write the history instead of the victors.’

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    Children’s Books: How to Find A (Friendly) Monster

    A little girl at an agricultural fair tries to locate the mischievous and amiable companion that keeps bounding ahead of her.

  • March 28

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    To Kill a President

    Though he violently hated abolitionists, Booth had a reverence for John Brown, who he judged as ‘inspired.’

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    Matriarchy on the March

    Humans who carry a Y chromosome are more likely to break the law, more likely to die in accidents, more likely to commit acts of violence. Who needs them?

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    Trail of Destruction

    Drawing a line from Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea to World War II air raids on Germany.

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    Smartphone Vigilantes

    Make a bad joke at a party and risk an awkward silence. Make it on Twitter and ruin your reputation forever.

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    Jewel of Andalusia

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