Jimena Canales’s captivating popular science text "Bedeviled" concerns the conceptual “demons” that drive scientific innovation. While scientists reject notions of demons... Read More

"A Series of Fortunate Events" is a lighthearted exploration of the roles that chance and coincidence play in human existence. That there is life on Earth at all, let alone... Read More

In the past few centuries, the map of Eastern Europe has changed far more than its western counterpart, as the rise and fall of empires—from the Holy Roman Empire to the Iron... Read More

Jedediah Purdy’s reflective essay collection "This Land Is Our Land" highlights the struggle Americans face when it comes to caring for the land and the environment. Purdy... Read More

Dan Hooper’s "At the Edge of Time" charts what is understood, and what remains a mystery, about the Big Bang—that moment 13.7 billion years ago of inconceivably high... Read More

Nicholas Buccola’s "The Fire Is upon Us" is a riveting, expansive companion text to a historic debate that swept the nation. On February 18th, 1965, two high-profile thinkers... Read More

One of the more startling facts Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor of Biology at Cornell University, cites in his comprehensive and essential "The Lives of Bees" is that... Read More

Nationalism and patriotism are not unfamiliar substances in America’s bloodstream. As Peter Martin’s "The Dictionary Wars" illustrates, such fervor extended into heated... Read More

Passions flare over the founder of Islam. He is variously considered the supreme prophet, the “embodiment of Islam,” a visionary leader, a reformer come to offer an... Read More

Gyan Prakash’s "Emergency Chronicles" fills the gaps and dispels the myths concerning a two-year period in the mid-1970s when Indira Gandhi declared emergency powers and... Read More

Daniel T. Rodgers eloquently decodes four centuries of Western history in "As a City on a Hill", in which myths and meanings of Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John... Read More

Martin Rees has been England’s Astronomer Royal since 1995; he also taught at Cambridge University. With his prestigious scientific background, he is well-positioned to... Read More