Books rise to the level of enduring art, I believe, when their writers take something ordinary and reintroduce it in a way that radically transforms it. The right work can make a subject that’s never ...

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in ...

Books ahoy! The new year promises adventures, escapes, and mind-bending delights for bibliophiles of all stripes. For fiction lovers, there’s George Saunders’ wild ride of a second novel, Ann Patchett ...

Buckeye is an historical novel set, as its title indicates, in Ohio. Stretching from pre-World War II to the close of the 20th century, the story focuses on two married couples whose lives intersect.

Books can be a refuge from (waves arms) all this, even when they take you deeper into the darkness of 2025. There is a grace in the relationship between book and reader, with nothing but your eyes and ...

The New Deal, George Selgin suggests, did not work the way most historians claim. This economist’s eye-opening analysis shows that the increased government centralization of the 1930s rarely resulted ...

From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year Joe Spring, ...

In this prodigiously researched epic, Torigian details the life of Xi Zhongxun—the father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping—to explain the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Along the way, ...

Ruth, the impish narrator of Kate Riley’s debut novel, is born into a little and little-known Anabaptist sect in Michigan. Riley, drawing on her own experience, feels no rush to lay out the group’s ...