A crop of new books attempts to explain the allure of conspiracy theories and the power of belief.

The excrement producers understood how much power they carried within them.

This is life in a dwindling community eroding by the day, adagio, slowly, like a seaside cliff.

The history of hipsters is a not-so-secret history of race in the Atlantic world.

“The world is a list of things / I keep from my father.”

Red Wave explores one American woman’s journey in the underground world of Soviet rock 'n' roll.

We’re going to see the angels / my father says but in Spanish

On masculinity and making sense of history.

In the early 20th century, the standardization of international time transformed fashion and commerce.

Or, the Ass of a Sociopath

Eager to commune with the past, a young archaeologist confronts the darker side of the field—and her own disillusionment.

In 1918, she became the first Black woman tennis player to appear on the cover of an American magazine.

The poet and critic on “coalitional writing,” upending the avant-garde, and Asian American identities.

As demographics shift, Latinos in Texas are claiming the majority and seeing themselves in the center of the national story.

It’s time to reckon with the true history of the mythologized Texas landmark—and the racism and imperialism it represents.

Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong.

For a century, Anglos from cold corners of the country have been lured here by the promise that this was a place where they could live among their own, in communities with nary a brown person in sight.

How can we be sure the atrocities of the past will stay in the past?

The man who challenged the CIA and sold weapons to the president of Guatemala

What does it mean that the same men who built a deadly rocket for the Nazis helped get America to the moon?

A sprawling chronicle of the Nazis' rise to power, decades in the making, sheds light on both the present and the past.

On finding the language to mourn.

The ways that Moscow commemorates victory over Nazi Germany bear a striking resemblance to the U.S.

As the climate crisis intensifies, try this simple exercise: count how many animals you can’t see.

Why it's okay to play with Manson family paper dolls: The first six installments of John Reed's Manson Family Paper Doll book. Print & Color Yourself!

The First World War ended a century ago, but its violence persists.

What Americans can learn from Germany’s confrontation with the past.

In the 1920s, a serial murderer began picking off members of the wealthy Osage tribe, in Oklahoma. David Grann on unearthing the story, which was nearly forgotten by history.

On the discovery of mass graves, and the importance of naming the dead, from Greek mythology to the so-called War on Drugs.

On the writer's new memoir, the conflict in Syria, and the importance of storytelling in moments of crisis.

Damien Chazelle’s so-called homage to movie musicals carelessly pillages a fraught form, reifying the tradition’s latent racism, classism, and sexism.

Recalling artists' collectives of the late ’50s and early ’60s.

The writer’s archive of traditional Moroccan music finds a new outlet.

On being a docent at Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, as told to Katherine Hite.

From learning to haggle in the medina to connecting more deeply with history, two New York City high-school students reflect on visiting Africa for the first time.

Is Shakespeare Dead?: A cultural inferiority complex leads to a quirky vision of the Bard.

Lost for words in the cradle of Chinese civilization.

What are we celebrating when we memorialize world leaders?

Apartheid, Germans, and genocide in Namibia

Boundaries of Nations: With time, I learned to love and master my scenes.

Reflections 100 years after Typhoid Mary’s quarantine on North Brother Island.

A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown.

A historical perspective on language and the criminalization of African Americans.

This Columbus Day, a Caribbean carnival arts collective invokes the deeper principles behind Carnival masquerades to create social change.

A look into the megalomaniac’s drug addiction.

Flash Fiction: Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son

Retracing Von Humboldt's footsteps, two centuries later, in a van.

At a Manhattan bookstore, Iraqi author Hassan Blasim’s reading touches off a discussion of more than just literature.

Introducing the author's own original intentions to discuss a topic relevant to everyone's own life.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author looks inside 1979’s subterfuge and the lead-up to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Identity and amour in an Israeli kibbutz following the Six-Day War.

What World War I analogies reveal about the current tensions between China and Japan

Millions of Europeans saw World War I as a positive thing.

The future needs us.

The fourth installment of The Social Author examines how literature lost its conversational dynamic, and why that’s a bad thing.

Why humor saves, with help from Twain.

It was just another Friday afternoon in the CBS studios, until it wasn’t.

The third installment of The Social Author explores social authorship and holy texts.

A Lakota man from the Cheyenne River Reservation went to Rapid City for heart surgery and came back with Klan insignia carved into his chest.

Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale.

Updike described Boston’s iconic Fenway Park, celebrating its 100th anniversary this spring, as “a lyric little bandbox.” Pure poetry—and pure fantasy—writes our author.

How the Shah’s dependence on the rise of oil prices and his need to fund his new military role ultimately led to his downfall and the implosion of Iran.

The lyric poet on editing Dickinson's letters, and the feral.

What the Occupy movement can learn from Ancient Rome.

How Greek philosophy can solve America’s budget crisis.

3 reasons why present-day Libya and ancient Rome are more similar than you think.

War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play.

On the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII, the novelist discusses the oral histories of Jewish survivors, the Nazi looting of art, and Pictures at an Exhibition.

"Historians hate to make predictions."