In honor of Black History Month, a new coffee-table book collects never-before-seen images taken by the American photojournalist and civil-rights advocate during a 1953 assignment in Chicago for Life magazine

By Carolina de Armas

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of a farmer, Gordon Parks said it was the “rural influence” of his upbringing that taught him how to “get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.” The youngest of 15 children, Parks was educated at a segregated elementary school. His youth was full of hardship, discrimination, and a devastating loss: his mother died when he was 14. But those experiences didn’t deter him. They drove him to document what it was to be Black in America.

At 15, after being kicked out of his READ ON

A breakdown of all of the unsolicited advice that will hit an unengaged woman in her early 30s—and why you shouldn’t listen to any of it

By Cazzie David

I once saw a chart online that mapped out the people you spend the most time with at different stages in your life. From 0 to 18, it was family; from 18 to 22, it was friends; and from 22 onward, it was a slow incline of time spent with your partner, until finally it’s just the two of you and everyone else is dead.

This means that choosing a partner is the equivalent of choosing the person who you will eventually enter a mutual solitary confinement with. In this sense, it doesn’t just affect your fate; it is your READ ON

By George Kalogerakis

Scores of Bowie books already exist, including several essential ones, but you’ll want to make space on that groaning shelf for Alexander Larman’s Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie.

Larman, a journalist and an author of well-regarded works on Lord Byron and Edward VIII, focuses on Bowie’s remarkable last act (The Next Day, Lazarus, Blackstar) but also, and every bit as compellingly, on what preceded it: a creatively dismal period during which the singer fell out of fashion—how un-Bowielike!—then enjoyed a career resurgence interrupted by a decade-long hiatus. Drawing on new interviews with Bowie’s collaborators and associates, as well as archival material, Larman offers a touching, detailed portrait of a gifted artist losing his bearings, flailing about, and re-inventing himself. Yet again. READ ON

While the California governor attempts to paint himself as a scrappy Everyman in his new memoir, behind the scenes, a powerful network of blueblood San Francisco dynasties has quietly buoyed his career for decades

By Paulina Prosnitz

In his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, which is out this week, California governor Gavin Newsom paints a picture of an adversity-plagued childhood in San Francisco. His father left the family when Newsom was a toddler, moving to Lake Tahoe and leaving his mother to work three jobs to make ends meet. He recounts being tormented by the neighborhood kids and his ongoing struggles with dyslexia.

At the same time, Newsom cannot avoid his family’s multi-generational ties with one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families: the Gettys. Newsom’s father was a close friend of oil tycoon J. Paul READ ON

A mammals expert for the American Museum of Natural History reveals how a former president of the New York institution used its resources to advance his eugenics agenda

By Darrin Lunde

After I am gone—dead, bled, embalmed, and buried—my ghost might very well haunt the American Museum of Natural History. Like a castle, the A.M.N.H. has stood in New York for 150 years, and for 20 of those years I was a part of its illustrious history.

Because of my expertise on mammals, the museum would send me off on far-flung expeditions throughout South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These were real scientific expeditions where I spent months camping out in the wilderness to collect mammal specimens. Proud to be a part of this history, I set out to write a book about two of the museum’s greatest explorers: Carl Akeley and Roy Chapman Andrews. READ ON

In a new book, Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Sebastian Stan, and other members of the cast and crew recall the fan-frenzy surrounding the aughts-defining show

By Lindsay Denninger

“When we first started filming, people would walk by and ask, ‘What are you filming?’,” Leighton Meester, who played Blair, told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “Once we aired [in 2007], the whole mania started.”

It wasn’t long before Gossip Girl’s New York City sets were mobbed with fans trying to get a glimpse of their favorite char­acters. “We were shooting on the Upper East Side one afternoon and must have been outside three all-girl schools. Within an hour, ten girls multiplied to 300. I mean, we weren’t the Beatles,” Chace Crawford, who played Nate, added. “Ed [Westwick, READ ON

By Helen Schulman

“I always set the table for breakfast the night before. I put out coffee cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, pots of honey and jam. Almost as a way of reaching across the hours of darkness that I fear, of proclaiming the harmony of the day…. That evening, as usual, I got everything ready. Even Dominique’s clothes…. I put out a pair of bottle-green corduroy trousers and a pink Lacoste polo shirt the children had given him.”

Thus begins Gisèle Pelicot’s searing, unforgettable, and strangely beautiful memoir, with the peaceful, deliberate, quotidian details of her and her husband’s retirement in Mazan, a READ ON

Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, and others pay tribute to the longtime host of the Bookworm talk show, who died this week

Joyce Carol Oates called him “the very Mozart of literary interviewers.” Norman Mailer, “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag, “a national treasure.” As the host of the literary talk show Bookworm for 33 years, from 1989 to 2022, Michael Silverblatt interviewed more than 1,200 writers, among them Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Martin Amis, Ocean Vuong, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, Fran Lebowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis. Look up your favorite author in the show’s archives, and it is almost certain that Silverblatt interviewed them.

He once described his preparation for interviews as READ ON

Hunted by his enemies and haunted by his past, living in exile in Mexico City, Leon Trotsky began an ill-begotten affair with Frida Kahlo

By Josh Ireland

Here’s one way of looking at the process of writing a nonfiction book. You start with a theory about your subject, be it a sports team, an economic phenomenon, an object, a quirk in child psychology, or, in my case, a long-dead Russian revolutionary. Then you spend months or years or decades trying to find out everything you can about the subject.

Naturally, the stuff we’re most interested in is fresh discoveries. What can I find out about this subject that nobody else knows? But these kinds of revelations are rare. So if that sort of knowledge isn’t available, READ ON

By Tom Scocca

“When people first see Mount Rushmore, most are shocked by its size, though not in the way they expect,” Matthew Davis writes in A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. “Most find it smaller than their minds had conceived.”

I experienced the same disorientation when I first encountered the monument. The familiar sculpture called “Mount Rushmore” is only a small part of the mountain Mount Rushmore, which itself is only a small section of South Dakota’s Black Hills. It’s hard to keep the monument in perspective as a physical object; the image of the presidential faces is carved as deeply, if not more deeply, into each American imagination as it is into the billion-year-old granite. READ ON

“She was the most captivating and the nicest and the most hardworking actress I’ve ever met”: a new coffee-table book collects the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt’s timeless pictures of the Italian cinema icon Sophia Loren

By Elena Clavarino

Sophia Loren began her career as did many poor, beautiful girls from Pozzuoli, Naples—in beauty pageants. Soon she appeared in the louche pages of Sogno, a magazine popular among those who couldn’t afford movie tickets. Her first Life-magazine cover dates to August 22, 1955, and features her as a feisty fishmonger in a still from the film Pane, Amore e… The article noted her “indifferent acting ability” but praised her “sensuous beauty and physique.” Loren was destined for more.

In 1958, she signed a five-picture deal with Paramount. Around the same time, one of Life’s seasoned photographers, Alfred Eisenstaedt—known as “Eisie” (pronounced READ ON

How a controversial biography of the Jane Eyre author overcame accusations of slander from the novelist’s hellish former headmaster, her critics, and even her father to establish her enduring myth

By Graham Watson

Shortly before she became one of the 19th century’s most scrutinized women, Charlotte Brontë told a friend that if strangers happened to look at her once, they made sure never to make the same mistake again.

She meant it humorously, but the remark also reflects her long experience of feeling underestimated, ignored, or pushed aside. Today, though, she is remembered as confident, erudite, and fiercely ambitious. Legend has given her a stature that life rarely did.

Between these two states was a mass of repetition and amplification. Gossip was repeated in Victorian newspapers, reinforced by the claims of people READ ON

This week, don’t miss a new history of China’s path to Communism, a re-examination of the Bernie Goetz subway shooting, and McNally Editions’ reprint of a forgotten dark comedy

By Jim Kelly

The writing of history belongs to the victors, so it is no surprise that for decades after the Communist Party of China came to power, in 1949, Mao Zedong was seen as the revered ideologue, and the man he overthrew, Chiang Kai-shek, as a corrupt Fascist forced to flee to Taiwan. What Frank Dikötter has done, elegantly and persuasively, is to blow up that myth and demonstrate, thanks to troves of official records, that beginning with its birth in 1921, the party was not so much a popular force as a cruel and poorly led one that never would have READ ON

For the past 50 years, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg have been collaborators, competitors, critics, and, most incredibly, close friends

By Paul Fischer

“It’s about young Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas. They were geniuses—and they were best friends.”

When I first started work on a collective biography of these three men—arguably the three most successful filmmakers in the history of American cinema—my pitch invariably started with some version of that sentence. A genius is a rare thing, and most of us live our whole lives never meeting a specimen; even art critics and historians struggle to define what one is. We recognize them more reliably by their impact on the culture, a self-reinforcing game of canon-making. By that standard, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are as worthy of the epithet as anyone who has picked up a camera. READ ON

By Lisa Henricksson

“Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring…. If you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests.” —Holger Rudi, Wolf Hour

Not anymore, unfortunately. It’s hard to approach the new thriller from Jo Nesbø, Norway’s all-time best-selling author and king of Nordic noir, with that stereotypically bland vision of the city, given what’s happened there in the past READ ON

Inside the love-hate relationship between two of the most powerful men in the N.F.L.—Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones—and the media

By Ken Belson

A key piece of covering the N.F.L.’s quarterly league meetings, as I have for a dozen years as a sportswriter for The New York Times, is trying to get the tight-lipped, billionaire team owners to talk about issues of the day. Mostly, it’s a fool’s errand. Few of them want to talk to the media, let alone be seen talking to you, and when they do talk, they are often guarded.

But the two most powerful owners—Jerry Jones, 83, of the Dallas Cowboys, and Robert Kraft, 84, of the New England Patriots—routinely speak with reporters, and their interactions say much about who they are and how they want to be perceived. Take the three-day owners’ meeting in 2023 at the READ ON

This week, don’t miss the secret history of the fund that reshaped American democracy, a memoir by Andrew Cuomo’s divorce attorney, and a chronicle of the fight to save the Siberian tiger

By Jim Kelly

In a country where so much of our politics is funded by dark money—funds given by anonymous donors to nonprofits that try to influence elections—it is both refreshing and startling to read about Charles Garland, a young banking heir in the 1920s who used most of his fortune to finance the American Fund for Public Service. What made this fund different from the foundations established by the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie is that its monies would go to fixing what its directors thought was broken in American capitalism. The A.C.L.U., unions, and the N.A.A.C.P., among others, all benefited from the fund’s seed money, and its legacy stretched from helping to finance Clarence Darrow’s defense in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925 to victory in the Supreme Court’s READ ON

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

By Gabriel Sherman

Last summer, a rumor circulated through the media industry that Rupert Murdoch, the media titan at the helm of the News Corp. empire, was gravely ill. A Fox Corp. spokesperson dismissed it, but the denial carried little weight with those who have watched the company for years. Back in 2018, Murdoch’s representatives insisted he was fine after he broke his vertebrae falling on his son’s yacht—an injury that was far more serious than the public was led to believe.

The speculation about Murdoch’s health forced a question that has long loomed over the industry: What does the media landscape look like without its most dominant figure? Murdoch turns 95 in March and is now rarely seen in public. I believe his most influential properties—Fox News, the READ ON

By Richard Lacayo

Though André Kertész is now recognized as one of the seminal photographers of the 20th century, for many years he languished in obscurity. First in his native Hungary, then in Paris, where he lived from 1925 to 1936, Kertész emerged as a pioneer of a new kind of photography—lyrical, but fortified by a peerless sense of composition. In America, where he spent the remainder of his life, recognition came late. For decades he was forced into uninspiring commercial work. In 1957, he told his friend the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï, “I am dead. You are looking at a dead man.”

Not quite. As Patricia Albers recounts in READ ON