Nancy Reagan’s Cross to Bear
The First Lady dedicated herself to achieving a picture-perfect life. A look at her traumatic—and covered-up—childhood helps explain why
The First Lady of the Skies
Between her record as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air and her disappearance a decade later, Amelia Earhart was the Eleanor Roosevelt of flying, championing women’s careers in aviation
Short List
Books to read this week, from a history of crime and punishment in ancient Rome to a novel of clashing cultures and an account of post–W.W. II recovery
Bon Voyage!
A new book collects the best of airport style, from an impossibly bouncy-haired Dolly Parton to Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin
Playing with Fyre
The bizarre, ongoing story of Billy McFarland, the mastermind behind the music-festival fiasco who started a podcast behind bars
Notes from Underground
Harriet Tubman left behind no written history of her life, but her stories—of the Underground Railroad and the allies she made along the way—live on
Revisionist History
Churchill gets a bad rap for the 1943 Tehran conference, where Roosevelt and Stalin won out. Looking back, the Old Lion might have been right all along
Splendor in the Grass
The story of how Central Park and its beating heart, the bucolic Sheep Meadow, came to be
Collecting Intelligence
The author and friend of John le Carré’s, whose radio tribute to the espionage writer is out now, traces the arc of le Carré through his most memorable books
Dogs—They’re Just Like Us!
Before quarantine puppies, there were Magnum dogs, photogenic canines immortalized alongside their owners by Philippe Halsman, Inge Morath, and others
Dial M for Mail
If Alfred Hitchcock contained multitudes, his films contained infinitudes in the eyes of his viewers, who wrote him too many letters to count
One Part Instinct, Two Parts Grit
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
Do You Believe in Magic?
A new book argues that some of the most astonishing findings in social science are little more than smoke and mirrors
Off the Wall
The photographer Horst A. Friedrichs celebrates the magic of independent booksellers and the volumes on their shelves, from the Strand to Shakespeare and Company
Post-Nature
Eight Questions with Nathaniel Rich, the novelist and author of Losing Earth, whose new book contemplates a return to the world we’ve ruined
Notes from Under the Sheets
Tracing the pre–Crime and Punishment love affair of Dostoevsky and Polina Suslova, a young, dazzling Russian radical
Re-writing History
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
