Sharon Stone discusses sexism in Hollywood, the plastic surgery she didn’t agree to, and a near fistfight with Basic Instinct co-star Michael Douglas

By Polly Vernon

Sharon Stone hits our Zoom call at a million miles an hour; she is up and out of the trap the moment I admit her, dazzling and unpredictable, ecstatic, then cheeky, then moved to almost tears, then furious, then regaling me with celebrity anecdotes so choice, I itch to pass them on.

It’s her 63rd birthday, which she’s celebrating at home, in Los Angeles, taking receipt of “all these incredibly cute videos! It’s been such a Covid year, so you don’t really get to see your buddies. Then to wake up… late… and everybody has really gone all out, sending me these hilarious videos. I’ve been laughing till I’m crying. Love! So much love, coming in!” READ ON

A new book argues that some of the most astonishing findings in social science are little more than smoke and mirrors

By Jesse Singal

“Science Is Real.” If you’ve driven or walked through an affluent liberal neighborhood in the last couple of years, you’ve likely seen this simple, three-word declaration on one of those “In This House, We Believe:” signs, alongside “Black Lives Matter” and “No Human Is Illegal.” They, it is implied—those mouth-breathing conservatives—don’t believe in science.

For a long time, I was in this camp. It baffled me that conservatives could be so cut off from reality. Why couldn’t they understand that the earth is billions of years old, that there are mountains of evidence supporting the theory of evolution, that climate change is real and human-caused? Why did they cling so tightly to their ignorance? READ ON

Eight Questions with Nathaniel Rich, the novelist and author of Losing Earth, whose new book contemplates a return to the world we’ve ruined

By Jim Kelly

One of the singular pleasures of reading Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth is his ability to find and bring to life on the page the women and men engaged in saving the planet. This skill is not surprising, given that Rich is also an acclaimed novelist, but it does help explain why he is so good at what he does, as amply demonstrated in his latest book of nonfiction, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.

JIM KELLY: Let’s start with a time-machine question. You write eloquently about how for many centuries the wilderness was seen as a godless domain, READ ON

By Sarah Weinman

When Richard Whittemore and Margaret Messler married in a Baltimore church, in October 1921, they were five years away from being the most famous couple in America. For a time, they were tabloid fodder for their criminal exploits and their apparent, all-consuming love. Dick, 20, was already a small-time crook with an affinity for gambling, his appetites eventually expanding to robbery and murder. Margaret, two years younger, loved her man and stood by him, proclaiming his innocence when the entire country knew (and not-so-secretly thrilled at) his guilt. They were the Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, and the grizzled reporters and sob sisters who gave them those monikers chronicled their every turn for a public eager to gobble up the drama. READ ON

By Andrew Roberts

It is not easy being the child of a great or famous person. Endless celebrities’ children’s memoirs remind us of that doleful fact, to the point that Famous-Parent Syndrome ought to be a recognized psychological illness. One person who coped with it well was Sir Winston Churchill, but then his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died aged 45, when Churchill was 20 years old, and so could not stymie his son’s life.

By contrast, Winston himself lived to be 90, and it is the contention of this well-researched, well-written, but often misguided book that he utterly stymied the life of READ ON

The photographer Horst A. Friedrichs celebrates the magic of independent booksellers and the volumes on their shelves, from the Strand to Shakespeare and Company

By Julia Vitale

Bookshops are a dying breed, one of the saddest casualties of the tech revolution. Their rarity makes coming across one that much sweeter, a feeling evoked in a new collection of photos by Horst A. Friedrichs. It’s a spellbinding spotlight on the world’s literature hubs, from New York City’s Strand, where $1 picks are a must, to Paris’s Shakespeare and Company, the go-to for Hemingway and Joyce, with the most charming of stops along the way: Maastricht’s sweeping Boekhandel Dominicanen, for one, and Pennsylvania’s rare-book haven, Baldwin’s Book Barn, in West Chester.

Needless to say, these shops are the READ ON

Antony Beevor is trading the page for the screen, joining forces with Ridley Scott for a wide-ranging series on W.W. II’s final year

By Ed Potton

The secret is out. For the past year and a half three big beasts of British storytelling have been collaborating on a television series that could change the way we see war on-screen. Antony Beevor, our preeminent war historian, whose books have sold more than eight million copies; Ridley Scott, the formidable director of Alien and Blade Runner; and the Oscar-nominated Steven Knight, who wrote the films Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, are behind the series, which will recount the final year of the Second World War in Europe, from June 1944 to June 1945.

With the working title READ ON

Tracing the pre–Crime and Punishment love affair of Dostoevsky and Polina Suslova, a young, dazzling Russian radical

By Alex Christofi

These days it is fashionable to treat Fyodor Dostoevsky as a kind of floating brain who spent all day at his desk pondering grand philosophical dilemmas, but in many ways his ideas were a direct by-product of a life filled with political and romantic intrigues. Perhaps the most intense of these was his affair with Polina Suslova, a brief, fiery relationship that would later inspire Martin Scorsese’s short film “Life Lessons.”

Having been arrested for advocating the emancipation of the serfs in 1849, Dostoevsky found himself living cheek by jowl with them in Siberia. Ten years later, he returned READ ON

Searching for Helen Frankenthaler gets personal for an author whose past is intertwined with that of the great American artist

By Alexander Nemerov

The librarian gave me a pair of flimsy white cotton gloves—a prerequisite to handling the letters and photos in the archive. Putting on these shapeless things—was that my thumb in the pinky hole?—I wondered what I was being protected from. Of course, it was the materials that were being protected from me. God forbid I get my dirty fingers on that dog-eared photo of the person smiling on the gray beach in the high-hiked swim trunks of yesteryear. But what if the gloves were actually protecting me from the past?

Strange spirits. Woken demons. A researcher does well to READ ON

Soviet Russia meets Weimar Germany in these avant-garde posters and drawings of the early 20th century, a gift to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection

By Julia Vitale

Plastered to buildings on busy streets and in town squares, reprinted on towering billboards and in newspapers and magazines, art in 1920s and 1930s Europe was functional. The days of “art for art’s sake” had gone the way of World War I and the Russian Revolution, replaced by an energized, laser-eyed focus on political and social engagement, be it in Soviet Russia, Weimar Germany, the newly constituted Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or postwar Italy. Reflecting the dynamism of a continent transforming its industry, technology, and labor, artists forewent the traditional for the purposeful. Photomontage became the new painting; propaganda posters, the new sculpture. READ ON

By Peter Bogdanovich

Let’s face it, David Thomson is probably the very best film critic-historian currently writing. And writing: his huge (1,168 pages, small type), extraordinarily detailed and beautifully executed New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition all by itself would be profoundly impressive enough. But Thomson has published maybe a dozen other equally valuable—each in their way—film books.

His newest has an evocative title with a clear double meaning: A Light in the Dark, subtitled A History of Movie Directors. Indeed, this work takes us through virtually all the widely varying qualities that directors have possessed—or should possess.

He explains:

What follows in the body of this book begins as a READ ON

By Max Carter

Steve Hely’s 2009 novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist, contains perhaps my favorite made-up book title: Caesar, CEO: Business Secrets of the Ancient Romans. I like it not because it’s ridiculous—it is—but because it’s entirely plausible. (The boss of Hely’s narrator swears by it and refers to his business rival as “Carthage.”) Why do I mention this? Oxford classicist Robin Lane Fox’s The Invention of Medicine cries out for Helyan subtitling: “Ancient Wisdom for Wuhan”; “Viruses and ‘Vaccines’ in Fifth-Century Athens”; “Hippocrates and Herd Immunity.” (The imaginary publisher favors alliteration.) The actual subtitle, “From Homer to Hippocrates,” gives little away. The good news: Fox’s READ ON

By Lisa Henricksson

Where classic mystery novels were an important motif in Peter Swanson’s best-seller Eight Perfect Murders, horror movies and Hitchcockian thrillers provide the signposts in his latest, Every Vow You Break. Vintage-wearing, poetry-loving Abigail Baskin, who works in publishing, is a big fan of the genres, an enthusiasm that draws her to gazillionaire tech investor Bruce Lamb after he spots her looking very Audrey Hepburn at a Manhattan coffee shop.

On their first date, they bond over their mutual obsessions, and he proceeds to sweep her off her feet intensely and expensively, introducing her to fine dining, craft cocktails, and READ ON

Edward Said managed to popularize the idea of a Palestinian state in the Reagan years. His biographer reveals the charm behind the chutzpah

By Timothy Brennan

Any biography of Edward Said is bound to surprise its author, as it did me, by concealing its point of entry. To find it, one must hack through a tangle of identities—author, pianist, filmmaker, State Department adviser, Council on Foreign Relations regular, New York belletrist. I knew him well enough to see him in unguarded moments, scotch in hand, but the more I wrote, the more he morphed before my eyes: half–literary theorist forcing universities to face the nonwhite world, half–media celebrity debating the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Ariel Sharon on the nightly news.

Behind my turmoil—I re-wrote the book three times—stood an elusive fact. Said certainly READ ON

Sir Francis Drake’s biographer traces the 16th-century explorer’s legacy in London, at sea, and beyond

By Laurence Bergreen

There are, roughly speaking, three ways to encounter the legacy of Sir Francis Drake, the first successful circumnavigator and the hero of the Battle of the Spanish Armada: in the field, in the library, and on the map.

Drake was a son of Devon and its undulating hills in Southern England. He was the eldest of 12 children, and his father, a farmer, was forced to abandon Devon for Kent, to the east, where he became a minister. At the time, religious conflict was rife, and which side of the Protestant-Catholic divide you were on determined your life’s course.

It was always apparent that Drake would have to make READ ON

Eight questions with Charles M. Blow, the author and New York Times op-ed columnist whose new book is a call to action for Black Americans to move South

By Jim Kelly

Charles M. Blow’s columns for The New York Times are unfailingly smart and provocative, whether or not you agree with them. His ascent at the paper is unique, since he is the only graphics editor who evolved into a columnist. His first best-seller, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, has been turned into an opera that will open this fall at the Metropolitan Opera. His new book, The Devil You Know, is an impassioned plea for Black Americans to migrate from the North to the South, where, he argues, they have a better chance of effecting political change.

JIM KELLY: READ ON

Francis Bacon’s emergence onto the London social scene—including the time he humiliated Princess Margaret—was as controversial as his paintings

By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

In the spring of 1949, the stylish wife of the press lord Esmond Cecil Harmsworth, second Viscount Rothermere, gave a sumptuous ball that conceded nothing to the austerity of postwar London. The men came in white-tie; the women wore the family jewels; the Queen Mother was there. So was the royal of the moment, Princess Margaret, who smoked cigarettes and palled around with friends the tabloids called the “Smarties.” The ball promised to end with a flourish when the princess, giddy with champagne and urged on by the Smarties, took the mike from Noël Coward. “All the guests who had been waltzing under the vast chandeliers instantly stopped dancing,” said one party-goer. “They stood like Buckingham Palace sentries called to attention in order to watch the royal performance.” READ ON

By Robin Olson

Once upon a time, a stewardess could speak two languages, mix a perfect martini, correctly address a prime minister, and prepare a Passover meal in flight. She was svelte, she was single, and she knew how to evacuate a jet in the dark, upside down, underwater. A Pan Am stewardess, that is. In Come Fly the World, Julia Cooke traces the careers of a group of women who flew with Pan Am from the launch of the jet age in 1958 to the crash of the company in 1991.

Getting the job was the first hurdle, and Pan Am READ ON

By Rachel Campbell-Johnston

“We are born and we die, that’s how it is.” Francis Bacon’s philosophy of life was blunt. “But in between,” he declared, “we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives.” Bacon relished and interrogated his drives — his desires and passions, lusts and obsessions — as much in his life as his work. He poured his impetuous talent into both. Little wonder that biographers are riveted.

Within five years of his death at the age of 82 in 1992, three lives had been published, the ground-setting Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiatt and Daniel Farson’s exultantly gossipy READ ON

What would Midnight Cowboy be without Dustin Hoffman in his creased white suit?

By Glenn Frankel

When I set out to write about the making of Midnight Cowboy, the gritty, groundbreaking X-rated drama that won the best-picture Oscar in 1970, I expected to focus on director John Schlesinger and on Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, whose powerful performances are among the finest in film history. But I soon discovered a parade of talented men and women who played pivotal roles in making the movie great.

None more so than Ann Roth. The wildly inventive costume designer created memorable outfits for Ratso Rizzo, a tubercular petty thief from the Bronx played by Hoffman, and Joe Buck, READ ON

Megan Nolan’s novel, Acts of Desperation, casts a fresh light on a timeless theme

By Clementine Ford

“How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?” the unnamed narrator asks in the opening pages of Megan Nolan’s excellent debut novel, Acts of Desperation. What happened between this man, who liked to smoke while he received oral sex, and this woman, who liked to lay on the floor while her lover circled her like a shark? Chronicling their obsessive, worshipful, ultimately hazardous love, the narrator performs an autopsy, with an eye to cause and motive.

She starts with the moment she first laid eyes on him, an art critic named Cirian, while looking for READ ON

By Sarah Ditum

Over the five years since Meghan Markle ascended from barely recognizable actress to Duchess of Sussex, you might have formed certain opinions about the Markle family — in particular, Meghan’s father, Thomas, and half-sibling, Samantha. You may, for example, think of them as the kind of trashy people who would sell staged paparazzi photos of themselves, pass private correspondence to newspapers and call Meghan “Princess Pushy” to journalists.

Such a reading, Samantha Markle says in this bizarre memoir, would be a wholly defamatory interpretation of perfectly innocent actions. Actions such as selling staged paparazzi photos of themselves, passing private READ ON

By Lisa Henricksson

Poor, awkward Florence Darrow. As beleaguered assistants go, she gets her fair share of abuse, but she knows that as the state-schooled, Florida-raised daughter of a single mom, she’s lucky to have landed at Forrester Books, a tweedy Manhattan publishing house. Lacking the sophistication acquired in utero by her pedigreed colleagues, Florence makes up for it with pluck, but she feels stymied. What she really wants to be is a novelist, or more accurately, to try on the life of a big-time novelist, even if her writing talent is questionable. So when she’s offered the job of personal assistant READ ON

By Max Hastings

When Diana Churchill was born in July 1909, the first of Winston’s five children, David Lloyd George asked with unaccustomed triteness if she was pretty. “The prettiest child ever seen,” the proud father said. Lloyd George nodded: “Like her mother, I suppose.” The sublimely egotistical Churchill would not stand for that. “No. She is the image of me.”

It is hard to imagine a worse fate for a child than to be born to such parents as the Churchills, not because they were cruel, but because they were giants who dwelled among giants. Routine houseguests listed in this book about the lives of their four daughters included Charlie Chaplin, TE Lawrence and the Mitfords, together with everybody who was anybody in power. READ ON