After the ancient Greeks invented rhetoric, it helped create the world’s first democracies. Today, it gives a real purpose to a liberal education, pulling together all of a student’s knowledge while giving her the tools to inspire others.

Reading With Patrick explores questions that idealistic students who seek to tackle social injustice might be moved to ask: can you change a life? Is it arrogant to think you can? Perhaps even more deeply, students can ask: What is a human connection made of? Who do we choose to connect with? If two people are from unequal circumstances, is the connection compromised from the start?

In The Fix, Jonathan Tepperman, managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, identifies ten pervasive and seemingly impossible challenges—including immigration reform, economic stagnation, political gridlock, corruption, and Islamist extremism—and shows that each has a solution, and not merely a hypothetical one.

By Sara Nović, author of Girl at War: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, March 2016) Recently my first novel became an audiobook to which I cannot listen. This is not a complaint, exactly; to write a book someone wants to publish in any format is a writer’s dream. But to hold some disc that

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off

Considering Hate moves beyond arguing about what is wrong with widely accepted understandings of violence and justice to propose ways that we might seek change. Much of the book is rooted in the disciplines of sociology, political theory, and cultural criticism.

Black Earth aims to connect the Holocaust to be understood as part of global history without eluding context and thus understanding by its very intensity and horror.

The naked violence, the absurdity of human suffering, the superhuman strength of a few will always be the headlines of war. But years and decades of political and religious conflict also has a way of seeping into the tiniest crevices of human society and culture. This cancer of war can alter the very DNA of nations, and there is often no going back to the old ways. So while understanding the stories of the heroes and villains of war is important, in The Faithful Scribe I set out to do something different: understand war from the view of the survivors.