Book cover of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands
International & World Politics

Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a “superpower marathon” that may last a century. Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? […Learn More]

Book cover of The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789 by Edward J. Larson
Biography & Autobiography

The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789

“An elegantly written account of leadership at the most pivotal moment in American history” (Philadelphia Inquirer): Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson reveals how George Washington saved the United States by coming out of retirement to lead the Constitutional Convention and serve as our first president. […Learn More]

Book cover of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick
History

Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington 

Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City.

For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. […Learn More]

Book cover of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic by Jay Cost
Politics & Government

Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic

A popular columnist for The Weekly Standard, conservative journalist Jay Cost now offers a lively, candid, diligently researched revisionist history of the Democratic Party. In Spoiled Rotten, Cost reveals that the national political organization, first formed by Andrew Jackson in 1824, that has always prided itself as the party of the poor, the working class, the little guy is anything but that—rather, it’s a corrupt tool of special interest groups that feed off of the federal government. […Learn More]

Book cover of The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright
Health and Psychology

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it
[…Learn More]

Book cover of The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones
Europe

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12.00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced. […Learn More]

Book cover of First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat by Christopher Shaw
Politics & Government

First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat

Investigating the essential role that the postal system plays in American democracy and how the corporate sector has attempted to destroy it.

“With First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, Christopher Shaw makes a brilliant case for polishing the USPS up and letting it shine in the 21st century.”—John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation and author of Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis […Learn More]

Book Cover of Reign of Terror How the 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman
History

Reign of Terror: How 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump

An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction

For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, it has pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance, as well as detaining people indefinitely and torturing them. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. […Learn More]

History

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure and private despair.

Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think. […Learn More]