Outbreaks of disease may have had a greater effect on the course of events than the actions and plans of humans.

The decline in his fiction over his lifetime was understandable. The mystery is why his worst journalism ever received such lavish praise.

“The Wager” is a story of resentment, insurrection, and a battle over the truth. Sound familiar?

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.

Jeff Sharlet saw close up how the far right has used grief and bitterness to grow its ranks.

A former dancer reckons with the rigors and ordeals of life in ballet.

What makes a mother stay and her estranged daughter leave Appalachia?

Matthew Dallek’s “Birchers” traces how conspiracy theories went from being a fringe pastime to the right’s defining feature.

The Foreign Policy Association tried to get ordinary people involved in foreign affairs. Why did they fail?

“Nights of Plague” is the story of an epidemic entwined with nationalism, unrest, and reaction.

Erica Berry’s book dissects the cultural fascination with wolves as symbols of everything that terrifies us.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explain how industry groups foisted free-market fundamentalism on the American public and demonized the alternatives.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

“Biography of X” is a search for a woman so powerful and prominent that no one really knew her.

Consulting firms may promise expertise and efficiency, but their effects on public agencies have been disastrous, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington explain.

Jenny Odell wants us to forget hours, minutes, and seconds and live with a different sense of time.

Adapted from a bestseller, “Daisy Jones” was premium intellectual property. The show never had to be good, just marketable.

A conversation with Zadie Smith about her new play, “The Wife of Willesden,” adapting Chaucer, her early influences, and making art in a pandemic

Our current system defines health as the ability to work. Those who can’t are abandoned and exploited.

Was the nineteenth-century Midwest “the most advanced democratic society that the world had seen”?