Categories
Interesting

HIT GIRLS

Journalist and podcaster Princiotti isn’t ashamed of her pop-music obsession, and thinks you shouldn’t be, either. She traces her love of the genre back to 2003, when she was 9, and “Hilary Duff was the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family.” The subject of Princiotti’s book is the […]

Categories
Interesting

SYNAP

Designated “Driver Eight,” 15-year-old Shiloh attempts neural linking with “the machine.” This giant robot landed on Earth long ago, and scientists from around the world have gradually recovered scattered parts. In the U.S., Synap Technologies, run by Shiloh’s father, Director Raguel, oversees each new robot-operating “Driver.” Shiloh, like others before them, uses something called the […]

Categories
Interesting

BOUND BY STARS

It’s 2212, and 17-year old Earther Weslie has won the Interplanetary Alliance Life Support Bot competition for her bot named ILSA, or Individualized Life Support Assistant unit 001. The prize is a first-class ticket on luxury starship The Boundless, scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to Mars, a five-week trip. In this future, the […]

Categories
Interesting

MARSEILLE 1940

German journalist and author Wittstock tells an irresistible story. He begins in the summer of 1940. Most of his subjects had fled Germany in the 1930s, then fled again, to Vichy France, unoccupied but submissive. Jews and intellectuals knew that their days were numbered. Although shocked by France’s collapse, most Americans opposed helping refugees. Running […]

Categories
Interesting

WHERE TYRANNY BEGINS

In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first […]

Categories
Interesting

THANKS FOR THIS RIOT

The stories in this collection plumb the performance of womanhood. Daughters, wives, girlfriends, and caretakers writ large reflect on their prescribed familial roles, their bodies, their professions, or their solitude with dry wit. Broken into three sections—“External Riots: Threats and Violence,” “Internal Riots: Secrets and Lies,” and “Laugh Riots: Growing and Trying”—the book grapples with […]

Categories
Interesting

OUR CONGRESS

Left to her own devices while Mom takes care of official business, Alice finds a series of friendly tour guides—including the specters of a cat, James Madison, and Blanche Bruce, the first Black senator to serve a full term—who take her around the building and fill her in on the party and electoral systems, the […]

Categories
Interesting

THE MONEY TRAP

Sama opens with a scenario worthy of a Matt Damon hero: threatened with blackmail by an unnamed bad guy, he connects with two ex-Mossad agents in downtown London who deliver the news that “there is a conspiracy to remove you from your job” and demand a cool million bucks to make it go away. Go […]

Categories
Interesting

THE GREAT BLACK HOPE

“Being a black quarterback,” wrote a Los Angeles Times sports columnist, “is like being a member of the bomb squad.” Make a mistake, in other words, and Boom! you’re done. In 1979, an era in which, writes Moore, “it was still a foreign concept that Black men could be the field generals,” two Black players […]

Categories
Interesting

GENTLEST OF WILD THINGS

Sixteen-year-old Eirene and her twin, Phoebe, who have light brown skin and curly black hair, live in Zakynthos, a town controlled by Leandros, a descendant of Eros. Women there are manipulated by Leandros’ Desires, magic that seemingly brainwashes them into being under their husbands’ control. After Alexandra, Leandros’ 18-year-old wife, dies suddenly and mysteriously, he […]