The Midnight Train

by Matt Haig published by Viking Books The Midnight Train, the latest novel by internationally bestselling author Matt Haig, was released on May 26, 2026. Marketed as a companion piece to Haig’s 2020 phenomenon The Midnight Library, the story explores themes of life, death, and the weight of human

How to Read a Tree

Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves Trees are the ultimate quiet observers. They have been standing there for decades, sometimes centuries, just watching the world unfold while we rush past them with our eyes glued to our phones. We treat them like scenery, just green noise in the background

Trudeau & Doonesbury

The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall - published by Abrams Books Joshua Kendall’s biography of Garry Trudeau functions less like a standard academic text and more like a cultural autopsy of the last five decades. He digs through the archives and sits down with

Marilyn and Her Books

The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe From the book publicity: Far from the spotlights of the Hollywood film sets and the flashbulbs of the press, Marilyn Monroe was a great reader and lover of books. Her association with writers did not stop at reading their words on the page. She

The Impossible Factory:

The Remarkable True Story of Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works, America's Innovation Machine The history of American industry is a graveyard of good ideas that were strangled in the crib by committees, middle managers, and the paralyzing fear of failure. It is a long, tedious record

Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love

Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski are two guys who are hopelessly, dangerously obsessed with games. And I don’t mean just the Sunday afternoon NFL slog where you’re parked on the couch with a bag of chips. I’m talking about anything with a scoreboard, a buzzer, a winner,

The Untold Story of NExT and the Remaking of an American Visionary

About today's featured book: In 1985, Steve Jobs—the brilliant, volatile founder of Apple Computer—walked out of his company’s headquarters, driven from the very corporation he had created. What happened next would transform not only his life and career, but the future of technology itself. For

ASTONISHED BY BEAUTY

A Field Guide to the Practice of Paying Attention From the book publicity: An invitation to slow down and experience the world through the mindful practice of natural history. What happens when we truly pay attention to the natural world? Astonished by Beauty offers a thoughtful and practical guide to

Last Gangster in Austin

Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia Ronnie Earle was a Texas legend. During his three decades as the district attorney responsible for Austin and surrounding Travis County, he prosecuted corrupt corporate executives and state officials, including the notorious US congressman Tom DeLay. But Earle maintained

American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed

Isaac Fitzgerald spent his childhood obsessed with Johnny Appleseed. It wasn’t just the Disney version; it was the way his father told the stories, turning a guy who planted trees into a family legend that represented the itch to just leave home and see what else was out there.

Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast

(Available July 14, 2026 from Knopf) For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married

My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern

From the book publicity: You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently, return hours of free time to our overworked brains, and make discoveries previously unimagined by humankind. The AI future is going to be unlike any

(One of) My Favorite Writer(s): Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg is a product of the red clay in Piedmont, Alabama, a place where the dirt dictates the terms of your existence. In the Calhoun County hollows, life is governed by a specific set of physical constraints: the weight of a pine log, the heat of a mill floor,

The Man Nobody Killed: A Haunting Book That Reclaims the Life of Michael Stewart

It’s rare to find a writer who can take a forty-year-old court transcript and turn it into something that feels like it’s happening right in front of you, but Elon Green has a real gift for that. With this book, he’s trying to reclaim the life of

The Mitigation Strategy: Clarence Darrow and the Invention of the Modern Defense (Part 2)

The legal reality for Leopold and Loeb was defined by the public mood of 1924 Chicago. State’s Attorney Robert Crowe possessed a complete confession, physical evidence linked to the defendants, and a motive rooted in cold intellectual vanity. Under Illinois law, the standard outcome for the premeditated murder of

The Arrogance of the Superman: Leopold, Loeb, and the Fatal Flaw of the "Perfect" Crime (Part 1)

In 1924, Chicago was defined by the physical distance between the South Side’s industrial centers and the private wealth of the Kenwood district. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb lived within a self-contained social ecosystem where high IQ and significant inherited wealth created a total detachment from the city’s

The A&R Alchemist: Fifty Years of Soul, Grit, and the Philly Groove

Joe McEwen’s Tastykakes, Soul Songs and Shining Stars is the culmination of fifty years spent inside the machinery of American music. A Philadelphia native who rose to become a powerhouse A&R executive at Columbia, Sire, and Verve, McEwen has assembled a lifetime of liner notes, personal essays,

Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond

Eve Plumb has spent five decades as a cultural Rorschach test for the American middle child, but the career that started at age six was never as simple as a sitcom trope. Before she was cast as the girl permanently trapped in Marcia’s shadow, she was a veteran of

Creativity and the Eccentric Mind

In The Danger to Be Sane, Rosa Montero dissects the porous border between the creative engine and mental fragility. Moving past the standard tropes of the tortured artist, Montero utilizes a blend of neuroscience, psychology, and literary forensics to examine how the brain operates when it isn't tethered

A Short, Strange Trip

The 1971 expedition to La Chorrera was supposed to be the Big Bang for the human mind. The McKenna brothers and their crew of psychonauts hit the Colombian mud with a theory, a stash of chemicals, and a plan to crack the skull of reality. They weren’t looking for

Burn It All Down and Start Over

A Radical Grammar Op-Ed The American political system is broken, and we’re long past the point of just trying to fix it from the edges. We’ve spent years watching the people in power turn the government into a private club. While regular folks struggle to pay rent, fill

In Praise of John Cusack

John Cusack has always looked like a man who just remembered he left the oven on, and frankly, that’s exactly why he’s one of the few actors who feels like a person rather than a piece of high gloss corporate hardware. While his contemporaries were busy sculpting their

Why We Still Need the Ritual of the Record Store

You're late; RSD was last Saturday.... The vinyl record is a relic that refuses to die, and once a year, we turn it into a religious experience. Record Store Day isn’t really about the music—not in the way the purists pretend. It’s about the ritual.

The Night the Lights Went On in Major League Baseball

Excerpt from Cramer's Choice: Memoir of a Baseball Card Collector Turned Manufacturer by Mike Cramer. Many a president has thrown out a ceremonial first pitch. On May 24, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt threw a ceremonial first switch. Roosevelt's action at 8?30 p.m. at the

Surviving the Season: A Chill Way to Keep Your Sanity on the Sidelines

Review of the book Surviving Soccer: A Chill Parent's Guide to Carpools, Calendars, Coaches, Clubs, and Corner Kicks by Karen Scholl If you’re currently powering your way through the week on nothing but cold coffee and the sheer grit required to coordinate three different practice locations in