In novels such as Silence, Endō Shūsaku examined the persecution of Japanese Christians in different historical eras. Sachiko, set in Nagasaki in the painful years between 1930 and 1945, is the story of two young people trying to find love during yet another period in which Japanese Christians were accused of disloyalty to their country.

In the 1930s, two...

The principles of value investing have resonated with savvy practitioners in the world of finance for a long time. In Creating Strategic Value, Joseph Calandro Jr. explores how the core ideas and methods of value investing can be profitably applied to corporate strategy and management.

Calandro builds from an analysis of traditional value investing...

In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by...

As human society continues to develop, we have increased the risk of large-scale disasters. From health care to infrastructure to national security, systems designed to keep us safe have also heightened the potential for catastrophe. The constant pressure of climate change, geopolitical conflict, and our tendency to ignore what is hard to grasp exacerbates...

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a...

Critical philosophy has always questioned the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of the flourishing of humanity. Yet today’s critical theorists often seem to engage only in critique. These times of crises demand more. No philosophical school is better...

In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors...

Why are measures of stress and anxiety on the rise when economists and politicians tell us we have never had it so good? While statistics tell us that the vast majority of people are getting steadily richer, the world most of us experience day in and day out feels increasingly uncertain, unfair, and ever more expensive. In Angrynomics, Mark Blyth and Eric...

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written...

Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path isn’t made any easier by all the clichés they hear about how to make a startup succeed—from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions.

This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of startups works and offers...

Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are...

Today’s most urgent problems are fundamentally global. They require nothing less than concerted, planetwide action if we are to secure a long-term future. But humanity’s story has always been on a global scale, and this history deeply informs the present. In this book, Jeffrey D. Sachs, renowned economist and expert on sustainable development, turns to...

Chinese cuisine without chile peppers seems unimaginable. Entranced by the fiery taste, diners worldwide have fallen for Chinese cooking. In China, chiles are everywhere, from dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, from the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber to contemporary music...

Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit is one of the masterpieces of Russian drama. A verse comedy set in Moscow high society after the Napoleonic wars, it offers sharply drawn characters and clever repartee, mixing meticulously crafted banter and biting social critique. Its protagonist, Chatsky, is an idealistic ironist, a complex Romantic figure who would be...

Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists’ past, describing...

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of...

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement...

In a bucolic idyll, a terrorist agonizes over the act of violence he is about to commit. On a remote island in the South Pacific, the investigation of a case of mass suicide reveals further mysteries. In a far-flung colony, a cynical trio sends an unwitting man into the wilderness in search of a chimera. Mixing romance and high adventure, intrigue and the...

Any realistic response to climate change will require reducing carbon emissions to a sustainable level. Yet even people who already recognize that the climate is the most urgent issue facing the planet struggle to understand their individual responsibilities. Is it even possible to live with a sustainable carbon footprint in modern American society—much...

Leadership is the habit of making good choices. Even in difficult and uncertain circumstances, the most effective leaders focus their attention and overcome entrenched patterns of behavior to push an organization to new heights of success. This capability is no fluke: the latest research on the brain shows that we can pinpoint the mental activity associated...

Conventional business wisdom tells us that entrepreneurs are society’s main source of innovation. Young founders leave college with a big idea, get to work in a garage, and build something that changes the world. Typical corporate employees, strangled by slow-moving bureaucracy, are blocked from making transformative discoveries.

In Driving Innovation...

Big cats such as lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars fascinate us like few other creatures. They are enduring symbols of natural majesty and power. Yet despite the magnetic appeal of the big cats, their origins and evolutionary history remain poorly understood—and human activity threatens to put an end to the big cats’ glory.

On the Prowl is a fully...

This year’s National Magazine Awards finalists and winners include outstanding writing that addresses urgent topics such as justice, gender, power, and violence, both at home and abroad. Personal pieces explore the toll of mass incarceration, including Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “Getting Out” (New York Times Magazine) and Robert Wright’s “Getting Out of Prison...

For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in...

Since Donald Trump’s first day in office, a large and energetic grassroots “Resistance” has taken to the streets to protest his administration’s plans for the United States. Millions marched in pussy hats on the day after the inauguration; outraged citizens flocked to airports to declare that America must be open to immigrants; masses of demonstrators...

by Michael T. Hannan, Gaël Le Mens, Greta Hsu, Balázs Kovács, Giacomo Negro, László Pólos, Elizabeth Pontikes, and Amanda J. Sharkey.

How categorization shapes our understanding of social life

Why do people like books, music, or movies that adhere consistently to genre conventions? Why is it hard for politicians to take positions that cross ideological...

H. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as “time machine,” “war of the worlds,” and “atomic bomb,” exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity’s place in the...

“Olivier Wieviorka presents a clear-eyed view of the achievements and limitations of resistance efforts, moving beyond romanticized tales of valor and dismissive tales of military ineffectiveness. Above all, the book shows the vital role played first of the British and, later, American secret services—all too often forgotten in Europe since the war—in...

In the popular imagination, retirement promises a well-deserved rest—idle days spent traveling, volunteering, pursuing hobbies, or just puttering around the house. But as the nature of work has changed, becoming not just a means of income but a major source of personal identity, many accomplished professionals struggle with discontentment in their...

The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply...

Why social media should face the same public-interest criteria as journalism

Facebook, a platform created by undergraduates in a Harvard dorm room, has transformed the ways millions of people consume news, understand the world, and participate in the political process. Despite taking on many of journalism’s traditional roles, Facebook and other platforms...

The turbulent life of a great artist as told by those closest to him

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was a breaker of boundaries and a consummate collaborator. He used silk-screen prints to reflect on American promise and failure, melded sculpture and painting in works called combines, and collaborated with engineers and scientists to challenge our...

A novel of Shanghai’s lower classes from the Man Booker International Prize-nominated author

Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the...

Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II—and it’s a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one wonderfully vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she...