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The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge-decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to pred...

Celebrated as the most innovative guitarist ever to play, Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) is renowned for symphonic solos and virtuosic picking (sometimes, with his teeth). But, as Philip Norman describes, before Hendrix was setting guitars aflame onstage, he was a shy kid in Seattle,   lucking at a broken ukulele and looking out for his father, who chided him for playing left- handed. Interweaving new interviews with friends, lovers, bandmates, and ...

In 1965, a young, up-and-coming illustrator by the name of Edward Sorel tore away layer after layer of linoleum from the floor of his $97-a-month Manhattan apartment until he discovered a hidden treasure: issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936, each ablaze with a scandalous child custody trial taking place in Hollywood starring the actress Mary Astor-and the journal in which she detailed her numerous affairs. Thus began a...

Filling a crucial void in our understanding of world history, Linda Colley reconfigures the rise of the modern world over three centuries through the advent of written constitutions. Her absorbing work challenges accepted narratives, focusing on rulers like Catherine the Great, who wrote her enlightened Nakaz years before the French Revolution, African visionaries like Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton, and Tunisias's soldier-constit...

The DNA double helix, penicillin, the X-ray, insulin-these are routinely cited as some of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century. And yet, the 1949 discovery of lithium as a cure for bipolar disorder is perhaps one of the most important-yet largely unsung-breakthroughs of the modern era. In Lithium, Walter Brown, a practicing psychiatrist and professor at Brown, reveals two unlikely success stories: that of John Cade, ...

When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother-or ...

Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations-like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths. Among its residents-wildly spanning decades, perspec...

A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union's symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic "u...

Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Mississippi River curls around an old plantation thick with trees, with a stately white manor house at its heart. Locals knew it as Carville-the site of the only leprosarium in the continental United States from 1894 until 1999, where generations of afflicted Americans were isolated, often until death. While experts today know that leprosy is not nearly as contagious as once feared, there remains a viru...

Widely considered "one of our most rewarding novelists, " Jerome Charyn "has upped the ante" (Larry McMurtry) by re-creating the voice of Theodore Roosevelt through his derring-do adventures as New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon-to-be twenty-sixth president. Beginning with his sickly childhood and concluding with McKinley's assassination in 1901, Charyn positions Roosevelt as a fearless crime fighter and pioneering enviro...

Lipsticks applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked-such memories are recalled with "crystalline perfection" (J. C. Hallmann, Brooklyn Rail) in Sarah McColl's breathtaking testimonial to the joy and pain of loving well. When her mother, Allison, was diagnosed with cancer, McColl dropped everything-including her on- the-rocks marriage-to return to the family farmhouse and fix elaborate meals in the hope of nourishing her back to health. In "t...

Elsa Morante's novels were once considered the greatest of Italy's postwar generation. Here, Ann Goldstein's "deft translation" (Madeline Schwartz, New York Review of Books) of Arturo's Island heralds a "second life" for the beloved author, finally garnering Morante "the new readers she deserves" (Lily Tuck, Wall Street Journal). Imbued with a spectral grace, the novel follows the adolescent Arturo through his days on the isolated Neapolitan i...

How did wolves evolve into dogs? When did this happen, and what role did humans play? Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes used the full array of modern technology to explore the canine genetic journey when our ancestors first learned to hunt together with wolves. In the process, he discovered that only a handful of genes have created the huge range of shapes, sizes, and colors in modern dogs. Providing insight into these adaptive stages in "prose bo...

The United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the idea that state-building can make the world "safe for democracy" but the return on that investment has been woeful. Witnessing this failure, many observers hold the view that investment in undemocratic countries should halt. Yet ignoring these troubled countries risks our safety. Drawing on his formidable foreign policy experience, Steve Krasner explains that eliminating cor...

Exciting fans of such writers as Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado with prose that shimmers and stings, Amber Sparks holds a singular role in the canon of the weird. Now, she reaches new, uncanny heights with And I Do Not Forgive You. In "Mildly Happy, With Moments of Joy, " a friend is ghosted by a simple text message, in "Everyone's a Winner at Meadow Park, " a teen precariously coming of age in a trailer park befriends an ...

The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motoris...

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park recreates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois. Ther...

Over the course of his photography career, Daniel Kariko came to realise that many of his most stunning subjects could be found in his own home. Kariko utilises a combination of a Scanning Electron Microscope and optical Stereo Microscope to achieve a portrait-like effect for insects and arthropods. Vibrant in colour and surprising in personality, these images reveal such details as the glittering eyes of a horsefly, the strong legs of a centi...

When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder's notebooks-filled with pearls of wisdom-and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to beco...

From colorful 30, 000-year-old threads found on the floor of a Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that sparked the Industrial Revolution, this book weaves an illuminating story of human ingenuity. Design journalist St. Clair guides readers through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization.