Tackling America’s Housing Crisis

Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry

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An Architectural History of a Modernist Masterpiece

Contributed by Alex Beam, author of Broken Glass Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece is an unusual book because it is about architecture, and it is also the story of two strong-willed, creative people. My ambition was to write a biography of a beautiful building, told

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Martin Hägglund’s This Life has won the René Wellek Prize

Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom has won the René Wellek Prize for the best book in the field by the American Comparative Literature Association. Winners of this award include Umberto Eco and Edward Said.   The awards committee in their citation offered high praise for This Life: “Martin Hägglund’s This

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David Wallace-Wells on the Science and “Humanities” of Climate Change

Contributed by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth Climate change is not a single subject, or a single story, but the theater in which all human life is now conducted, transforming and reordering nearly every aspect of modern life—our infrastructure and our migration patterns, our cities and our energy systems and our agriculture, our

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Robert K. Massie: 1929 – 2019

Robert K. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and biographer who is best known for chronicling the history of Russia through his insightful books on its most fascinating and consequential figures, passed away on Monday, December 2, 2019, at age 90. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Massie studied American history at Yale and European history at

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Bringing Students to a Necessary Conversation

Contributed by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, authors of the book Unbelievable In journalism we have a word for a story that resonates, that gets passed around and talked about, that so engages or infuriates or floors its readers that they feel compelled to share it with someone else. This kind of story forces

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Julia Lovell wins 2019 Cundill History Prize

UPDATE: Julia Lovell, author of Maoism: A Global History, has been declared the winner of the 2019 Cundill Prize. Alan Taylor, Chair of the Jury, praised Lovell: “Her book will dazzle readers with lucid and vivid insights into the power of a protean, and often deadly, ideology – and its enduring impact on our world

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Interviews, Reviews, and News: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, has been called the most anticipated novel of the year. Gilead and the world of the handmaids have inspired a successful TV adaptation, as well as protests against U.S. healthcare restrictions and the controversial confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Awarded the 2019 Booker Prize, The Testaments has

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A Yale Law Professor’s Stand Against Meritocracy

In his new book The Meritocracy Trap, Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits presents a revolutionary new argument attacking the false promise of our so-called meritocracy. Americans still hold tight to the meritocratic ideal: that social and economic rewards should follow achievement; that social mobility should be possible, if hard-earned. But today, meritocracy has become

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Barack Obama Shares His 2019 Summer Reading List

Summer might be ending soon, but there’s still time to pick up some of Barack Obama’s seasonal reading picks!   Last month, former President Barack Obama continued his annual tradition of sharing his summer reading list on his Facebook Page, and many of his selections are published by Penguin Random House imprints. Mr. Obama begins

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The Booker Prize 2019 Finalists

We are thrilled that two Penguin Random House authors, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, have been honored as finalists for the 2019 Booker Prize. The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, which has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over 50 years. It is awarded annually

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FROM THE PAGE: Beaten Down, Worked Up

In recent years, corporate profits have skyrocketed in the United States. Workers often haven’t seen the same good fortune as their employers, with wages on average remaining stagnate or seeing only slight increases after inflation. In this excerpt from Beaten Down, Worked Up, reporter Steven Greenhouse shares the struggles faced by many Americans, their stories

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