Journalism History

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?...

Here, against a backdrop of late-night tattoo sessions and soldier-of-fortune trade shows, Dr. Thompson is at his apocalyptic best - covering emblematic events such as the 1987-88 presidential campaign, with Vice President George Bush, Sr., fighting for his life against Republican competitors like Alexander Haig, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson; detailing the GOP's obsession with drugs and drug abuse; while at the same time capturing momentous social phenomena as they occurred, like the rise of cable, satellite TV, and CNN - 24 hours of mainline news.

In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020 - a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil - National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Evan Osnos returned to three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of 21st-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution.

From the prophetic author of the now-classic What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, an eye-opening account of populism, the most important—and misunderstood—movement of our time. Rarely does a work of history contain startling implications for the present, but in The People...

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A searing portrait and damning takedown of America’s proudest citizens—who are also the least likely to defend its core principles “This is an important book that ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand politics in the perilous Age of Trump...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE The astonishing true story of “one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city NOW...

This book is a unique inquiry into the history and the ongoing moral significance of mass communication as an idea and social form. Organized around narrative accounts of individuals and their communicative worlds, it strives to refigure mass communication as a concept, illuminate significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history, and call listeners to reconsider their own engagements with it today.

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media. We live in an information age, but it is...

When Miranda Sawyer interviewed Liam Gallagher in 1994, his gag wishing Damon Albarn would die of AIDS became front-page news all over the world. This fascinating pop history, exploring the moment British music suddenly meant everything, explains why. Picking out twenty key songs, delving into the surprising stories behind them and their unlikely creators, UNCOMMON PEOPLE takes us back to when Jarvis Cocker became a national hero, films like Trainspotting were international hits, rave became what everybody did - and it felt like the revolution was happening.

Shortlisted for Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Award A Publishers Lunch NonFiction Buzz Book| Named Most Anticipated by Los Angeles Times A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that “real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain—in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism” (The New York...

Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize A New York Times bestseller A Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A New York Times Notable Book “Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel...

A veteran music journalist explores how four legendary rock bands—KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz—laid the foundation for two diametrically opposed subgenres: hair metal in the '80s and grunge in the '90s. It was the age when heavy-footed, humorless dinosaurs roamed the hard-rock...

A Lie Too Big to Fail asserts the idea that a government can never investigate itself in a crime of this magnitude. Was the convicted Sirhan Sirhan a willing participant? Or was he a mind-controlled assassin? It has fallen to independent researchers like Pease to lay out the evidence in a clear and concise manner, allowing listeners to form their theories about this event. Pease places the history of this event in the context of the era and provides shocking overlaps between other high-profile murders and attempted murders of the time.

A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath.

The long-buried story of three extraordinary female journalists who permanently shattered the barriers to women covering war Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to...

A sweeping behind-the-scenes look at the last four turbulent decades of “the paper of record,” The New York Times, as it confronted world-changing events, internal scandals, and faced the existential threat of the internet “An often enthralling chronicle [that] delivers the gossipy goods...

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded by the district's Bureau of Land Management office as taking place in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That...