"The slippery online ecosystem of encrypted messages, leaked documents, black markets, cryptocurrencies, and fake Facebook profiles (68 million of them) is the perfect breeding ground for identities. Some are true, some are false, and some lie in between. The old Internet shorthand IRL--"in real life"--now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences, but rather the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life,...

"From bestselling author Gary Krist, a vibrant and immersive account of New Orleans' other civil war, at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the battlegrounds of the Crescent City. Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city's elite 'better half' against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century...

"Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858. Her life story, which she recounted in an oral history decades later, captures the complexity of emancipation. Based on interviews that Joyner and formerly enslaved people had with the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, historian Carole Emberton draws a portrait of the steps they took in order to feel free, something no legal mandate could instill. Joyner's life exemplifies the deeply...

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush's America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, searching for phantom fighter jets in Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement.--From publisher description.

An incisive narrative about a teen rape case that divided a Rust Belt town, exposing the hostile and systemic undercurrents that enable sexual violence, and spotlighting ways to make change. In football-obsessed Steubenville, Ohio, on a summer night in 2012, an incapacitated sixteen-year-old girl was repeatedly assaulted by members of the "Big Red" high school football team. They took turns documenting the crime and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and...

A look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism.

The New Wild West is the definitive account of what's happening on the ground and what really happens to a community when the energy industry is allowed to set up in a town with little regulation or oversight - and at what cost.