The Last Great Media Mogul
At 94, Rupert Murdoch—who just launched a new tabloid, California Post—is the last vestige of the golden age of press barons, from Hearst to Pulitzer
The Empress Has No Clothes
Sir Edmund Backhouse, the author of a highly influential book on the Qing empress dowager Cixi, claimed affairs with everyone from Oscar Wilde to the empress herself—but was any of it true?
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a study of John Cheever’s short stories by his daughter, a fresh look at the siege of Leningrad, and an analysis of plagiarism for the age of A.I.
The Curious Case of Mike Lynch
A toxic culture—complete with piranha tanks and Bond-villain rooms—ran rampant at the company founded by the British tech tycoon, who died in a freak yacht accident
“The Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”
A new book charts one man’s decades-long search for the lost Spanish galleon featured in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera
Editor’s Picks
This week, don’t miss a biography of the literary critic who championed Faulkner and Kerouac; a study of “vampire panics”; and a fresh translation of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War
Rodney Everlasting
With the magic of Wes Anderson, the imagination of René Magritte, and the mystery of Alfred Hitchcock, Rodney Smith’s photographs—collected in a new coffee-table book—create a fantastical world untouched by time
Daddy Issues
To the outside world, my father was a gifted and accomplished author. To his family, he was a self-destructive and deeply flawed man
The Oddest Couple in American Literature: Part IV
Norman Mailer snubbed Lawrence Schiller when accepting the Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner’s Song. But that didn’t stop Schiller from cutting Mailer in on his latest exclusive: Lee Harvey Oswald’s K.G.B. files
The Cult of Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Norwegian writer inspires a reverence bordering on worship among his mostly male fans. He can bring grown men to tears with a single sentence
Gone with the Winds
How an unexpected shift in the weather brought news of the Chernobyl disaster to the West—and marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union
Pretty Privilege for Sale
GLP-1s are making it possible to rig the genetic lottery. What happens to the people who can’t afford them?
Promising Young Women
Jean Seberg, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Agnès Varda … a coffee-table book pays tribute to the women of the French New Wave
Modern Times
A new coffee-table book gathers the work of 300 designers—among them Florence Knoll, Lina Bo Bardi, and Charles Eames—whose creations shaped midcentury style around the world
“Area Loser Wants Job”
The longest-serving editor of The Onion on how a group of “unemployable” twentysomethings created America’s foremost satirical publication
Christmas in Black and White
From Santas protesting on Fifth Avenue to plastic Nativity scenes, a new coffee-table book collects Lee Friedlander’s pictures of the holidays in America
The Sarkozy Redemption Tour
The former French president has turned his 20 days in prison—Soggy baguettes! Plastic pillows!—into a 200-page best-selling memoir
