Perhaps you’re the sort of person, as I am, whose eye fastens on any story in print or on a screen about the CIA. If so, you’ve probably gotten the impression that, until Donald Trump took office again on January 20, 2025, the Agency’s record had been mixed since 9/11. The...
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Amazon lists more than 3,000 books about Donald Trump, and I feel as though I’ve read most of them. (Well, at least 23, anyway.) So, why do we need yet another one? Of course, he’s now well into his second term, and a lot has happened since January 20, 2025. A whole lot. So...
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A review of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. ★★★★★. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. The number of prisoners of African-American and Latino descent is wildly out of proportion to their share of the general population, and the War on Drugs accounts for the lion’s share of the difference.
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Close observers could see signs of President Joe Biden’s physical and neurological decline even before he took office in January 2021. But, as journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson detail in their explosive new book, Original Sin, “what was going on in private was worse.” Far...
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The pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe themselves as liberals, and the public looks on them that way. But conservatives will find the two men subscribe to many of their long-held beliefs. That’s the message in Abundance, Klein and Thompson’s thought-provoking new book. And...
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No major country, with the possible exception of Russia, has undergone such tumultuous change over the past century as has China. The Japanese invasion and occupation (1931-45). Civil war (1927-49). The Chinese Revolution (1949). Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958-60). The Cultural...
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It’s well known that the history of the Catholic Church is rife with tales of corruption and murder—and that internal conflicts roiling the Church continue today over pedophile priests, the role of women, divorce, and gay marriage as well as theology. What’s less well known are the...
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Remember the Peace Dividend? The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union was no more, history had come to an end, and the United States had won the Cold War—right? Well, if only it were so simple. Here we are, three decades later, and relations among the world’s most powerful countries now...
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Most news media in the United States, and probably everywhere else, report on world affairs country by country with only occasional forays into regional reports. We learn about events piecemeal. In China. In Russia. And in every other country where something newsworthy has proven to be dramatic or...
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When Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, appeared in 2000, it led to something like the viral impact about which Gladwell wrote in the book. The Tipping Point spent eight years on The New York Times Bestseller List and to date has sold...
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Few topics have so dominated conversation in America since November 8, 2016, as the behavior of the country’s forty-fifth president. Some commentators have likened the attention received by Donald Trump to that afforded Ronald Reagan three decades earlier. But there’s no comparison: Trump wins...
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This book is a story about how one nation, the United States, turned people’s minds into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we, the people, can put down our weapons and build something better.” So writes Annalee Newitz in the preface to Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the...
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Many Americans seem to assume that the current tension between the US and China arose only with the election of Donald Trump in 2016—or with the rise of Xi Jinping to the top of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) four years earlier. But that’s far from the case. In Overreach: How China...
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A Harris Poll released in November 2022 by U.S. News & World Report revealed just how deeply divided Americans are about race. Forty-seven percent of Americans—and 71 percent of White Americans—said they were “unconvinced that systemic racism exists in the U.S.” And in a YouGov...
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Early in his career as a rising provincial official, people locally viewed him “as a cautious and somewhat nondescript administrator, one who preferred working by the book and avoiding decisions that could backfire later.” But, as Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong makes clear...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Globalization is puzzling. That iPhone you may have at hand contains parts manufactured in forty-three countries on six continents—and that doesn’t even count the raw materials. But how did all that stuff get to the factory in China or India that fit them...
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Ask just about any American at random to describe the Chinese political system, and the answer is likely to be “Communism.” It’s a convenient label that results from Mao Zedong’s 1949 revolution and seven decades of reporting by and about the Chinese Communist Party. Not to...
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You may have come across reports about the violence surrounding the mining of the rare mineral coltan in Central Africa. It’s a source of the element tantalum, which is essential in the manufacture of cell phones and laptops. And about eighty percent of the world’s supply comes from...
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Follow the news about the high-tech industry, and you’ll likely come across apocalyptic warnings that China is about to overtake the US in just about every field that matters, from artificial intelligence to semiconductors. What a relief it is, then, to read Chip War, a sober, up-to-date...
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If anyone ever tries to tell you that politics doesn’t matter, I suggest you raise the case of North Korea. Now, I don’t mean the big abstracts like “Communism” and “dictatorship” and “rogue state.” I’m referring to the little things, the daily...
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...includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.