Matt Lewis and the News Archives

Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success

For readers of Atomic Habits, Deep Work, and Peak comes a game-changing approach to mastering new skills and succeeding faster.

For generations, we’ve been taught there are two ways to succeed—either from talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path—one that has quietly launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering. […Learn More]

The Black Boom

In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration. To acknowledge as much is not to endorse the 45th president but rather to champion policies that achieve a clear moral objective shared by most Americans. […Learn More]

Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? […Learn More]

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Surging sea levels are inundating the coasts.”

“Hurricanes and tornadoes are becoming fiercer and more frequent.”

“Climate change will be an economic disaster.”

You’ve heard all this presented as fact. But according to science, all of these statements are profoundly misleading. […Learn More]

The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America’s most prosperous. 34 square blocks of Tulsa’s Greenwood community, known then as the Negro Wall Street of America, were reduced to smoldering rubble. […Learn More]

The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

For thousands of years, thinkers and scientists have tried to understand what the brain does. Yet, despite the astonishing discoveries of science, we still have only the vaguest idea of how the brain works. In The Idea of the Brain, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb traces how our conception of the brain has evolved over the centuries. Although it might seem to be a story of ever-increasing knowledge of biology, Cobb shows how our ideas about the brain have been shaped by each era’s most significant technologies. Today we might think the brain is like a supercomputer. In the past, it has been compared to a telegraph, a telephone exchange, or some kind of hydraulic system. What will we think the brain is like tomorrow, when new technology arises? […Learn More]

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]

Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks, a dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, whose farsighted vision and inspired action preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930’s–Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they’d died then, history would scarcely remember them. […Learn More]

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II

A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalin—not Hitler—was the animating force of World War II in this major new history.

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. […Learn More]

First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation. […Learn More]