Social High

The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets Without Honor tells the story of the attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict.

Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....

When Ned and his identical twin brother tumble from their raft into a raging, bewitched river, only Ned survives. Villagers are convinced the wrong boy lived. Sure enough, Ned grows up weak and slow, and stays as much as possible within the safe boundaries of his family's cottage and yard. But when a Bandit King comes to steal the magic that Ned's mother, a witch, is meant to protect, it's Ned who safeguards the magic and summons the strength to protect his family and community.

A Wicked War presents the definitive history of the 1846 war between the United States and Mexico - a conflict that turned America into a continental power. Amy Greenberg describes the battles between American and Mexican armies, but also delineates the political battles between Democrats and Whigs - the former led by the ruthless Polk, the latter by the charismatic Henry Clay and a young representative from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Greenberg brilliantly recounts this key chapter in the creation of the United States authority and narrative flair.

Worried that old age will inevitably mean losing your libido, your health, and possibly your marbles too? Well, Cicero has some good news for you. In How to Grow Old, the great Roman orator and statesman eloquently describes how you can make the second half of life the best part of all - and why you might discover that reading and gardening are actually far more pleasurable than sex ever was.

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe. We traditionally think of the Cold War as a post-World War II diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Westad argues that the conflict must be understood as a global ideological confrontation with roots in the industrial revolution and with continuing implications for the world today.

Norco '80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men - led by an apocalyptic born-again Christian - attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in US history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, Norco '80 transports the listener back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all.

In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted 49 Nobel Prize winners - along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers - at a famed White House dinner. Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of "the people's house."

Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past 50 years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient.

In his audiobook, A Higher Loyalty, former FBI director James Comey shares his never-before-told experiences from some of the highest stakes situations of his career in the past two decades of American government, exploring what good, ethical leadership looks like and how it drives sound decisions. His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of powe, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader.

In this bold examination of the Israeli-American relationship, Walter Russell Mead demolishes the myths that both pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists have fostered over the years. He makes clear that Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and that American Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state, citing examples from the time of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller to the present day.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a colloquial new translation by Susan Sauve Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

This book exposes the truth that the climate change hoax is a political movement aimed at eliminating capitalism by spreading alarming disinformation that in order to "save the Earth" from global warming, we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies. The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation reveals a science-based understanding of Earth's climate and temperature that Green New Deal proponents are trying to hide.

More than half a century since Roswell, UFOs have been making headlines again. On December 17, 2017, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Pentagon program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The article hinted, and its sources clearly said in subsequent interviews, that some of the ships in question couldn't be linked to any country. The implication was that they might be linked to other solar systems. The UFO community - those who had been thinking about, seeing, and analyzing UFOs for years - was surprisingly skeptical of the revelation.

Long before the European Enlightenment and the Darwinian revolution, which we often take to mark the birth of the modern revolt against religious explanations of the world, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked skepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter and notions of matter based on atoms.

Cassie McKinney has always believed in the Hive. Social media used to be out of control, after all. People were torn apart by trolls and doxxers. Even hackers - like Cassie's dad - were powerless against it. But then the Hive came. A better way to sanction people for what they do online. Cause trouble, get too many "condemns", and a crowd can come after you, teach you a lesson in real life. It's safer, fairer, and perfectly legal. Entering her senior year of high school, filled with grief over an unexpected loss, Cassie is primed to lash out.

In Higher Animals, New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explores how MRNA vaccines have transformed the scientific landscape and helped spark a biotechnology revolution. Biology is information, and increasingly, that means digital information. We need to think of biology the way we think about computer code, only instead of bits and bytes, we use the genetic letters: ACGT. The widely-used mRNA COVID vaccines offer the most immediate example of this groundbreaking moment in medical and scientific history.

The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of Samuel Derrick, Jack Harris, and Charlotte Hayes, whose complicated and colorful lives were brought together by the publication of Harris' List, an infamous guidebook of prostitutes which detailed addresses, physical characteristics, and "specialties". The true history of the book is a tragicomedy motivated by poverty, passionate love, aspiration, and shame.