The radical anthropologist was that rare figure: a scholar who was also an activist.

In history and pop culture, a wave of revisionism has subtly cleaned up the agency’s image.

Two new books by Jason Diamond and Eula Biss expose the fraught moral dilemmas of living in the ’burbs.

A new book argues that the threat of secession has never left American politics.

Francesca Wade’s book rediscovers the neighborhood that gave Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. a place to think and write.

Michael Almereyda’s movie dismantles romantic notions about creativity, invention, and making money.

The documentary about a political boot camp is a depressingly accurate microcosm of the American electoral circus.

“The Last Great Road Bum” is a portrait of an American coming to political consciousness.

The comic thriller “Squeeze Me” is set, like Hiaasen’s other books, in Florida—which turns out to make a big difference.

Did distractions, disruptions, and gossip shape Tolstoy’s novel as much as long-simmering ideas about morality and desire?

In disastrous interviews and his most famous novels, he struggled to reckon with racism and white supremacy.

From George Washington to Simón Bolívar, magnetic leaders built modern democracies. They also broke them.

The latest season of Leon Neyfakh’s podcast is another forensic dissection of a well-known, but little-understood, part of American history.

Barry Gewen’s biography is an exercise in downplaying the critics and justifying the abuse of power.

The much-celebrated debut novel is representative of a younger generation’s approach to age-old dilemmas.

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

Two books offer different approaches to the changing relationship between humans and nature.

Anti-Trump conservatives didn’t bring down Bernie Sanders. There are other forces pulling the Democratic Party to the center.

Johnny Depp and Mark Rylance play the enforcers of empire in the film based on J.M. Coetzee’s novel.

The Trump era has birthed a distinct new genre of political writing: irate, forgettable, and strangely complacent.