"Crisis has a way of laying bare our truest selves: who we trust, which principles and impulses we heed, whose lives we deem expendable. As it ravaged millions of lives, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed and accentuated the dividing lines that had already, for decades, splintered American public life. Against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election, misinformation regimes, and the transformation of the facemask into a flagrant political symbol,...

"Essays, speeches, and journal entries from one of our most admired and best-loved poets that illuminate how he came to understand himself as a poet, the events and people that he wrote about, and the older poets who influenced him. In prose both as superbly rendered as his poetry and as down-to-earth and easy as speaking, Levine reveals the things that made him the poet he became. In the title essay, originally the final speech of his poet laureate...

"While in the short term -- militarily -- the North won the Civil War, in the long term -- ideologically -- victory went to the South. The continual expansion of the Western frontier allowed a Southern oligarchic ideology to find a new home and take root. Even with the abolition of slavery and the equalizing power of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the ostensible equalizing of economic opportunity afforded by Western expansion, anti-democratic...

An "illustrated chain of entanglements (romantic and otherwise) between some of our best-loved writers and artists of the twentieth century ... from Frida Kahlo to Colette to Hemingway to Dali; from Coco Chanel to Stravinsky to Miles Davis to Orson Welles"--Back cover. "A vibrantly illustrated chain of entanglements (romantic and otherwise) between some of our best-loved writers and artists of the twentieth century--fascinating, scandalous, and surprising"--Amazon.com....

"As Jude Blanchette details in China's New Red Guards, two worrying trends in contemporary China point to Maoism's revival. First, an increasingly popular hard-edged form of nationalism that is reflexively anti-Western has taken root. The second is an unapologetic embrace of extreme authoritarianism that draws inspiration from the Maoist era. China's assertive stance in the South China Sea and anti-Japanese rhetoric represents the former, and the...

Growing up, the words finance, savings, and portfolio made Danielle Town's eyes glaze over, and the thought of stocks and financial statements shut down her brain. The daughter of a successful investor and financial author, Phil Town, she spent most of her adult life avoiding investing -- until she realized that her time-consuming career as lawyer was making her feel anything but in control of her life or her money. Determined to regain her freedom,...

"Cartoonist Sarah Glidden accompanies her two friends--reporters and founders of a journalism non-profit--as they research potential stories on the effects of the Iraq War on the Middle East and, specifically, the war's refugees. Joining the trio is a childhood friend and former Marine whose past service in Iraq adds an unexpected and sometimes unwelcome viewpoint, in the eyes of the people they come across and perhaps even their own. As the crew...