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No Sense in Wishing: Essays
by Lawrence Burney
An essay collection from culture critic Lawrence Burney that is a personal and analytical look at his home city of Baltimore, music from throughout the global Black diaspora, and the traditions that raised him. For fans of Hanif Abdurraqib, Kiese Laymon, and Isaac Fitzgerald. There are moments throughout our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression, helping inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward. In No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him. In a time when music is spearheading Black Americans' connection with Africans on The Continent, Burney takes trips to cover the bubbling creative scenes in Lagos and Johannesburg that inspire teary-eyed reflections of self and belonging. Seeing his mother perform as the opening act at a Gil Scott-Heron show as a child inspires an essay about parent-child relationships and how personal taste is often inherited. And a Maryland crab feast with family facilitates an assessment of how the Black people in his home state have historically improvised paths for their liberation. Taking us on a journey from the streets of Baltimore to the concert halls of Lagos, No Sense in Wishing is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Burney's search for self. With its gutsy and uncompromising criticism alongside intimate personal storytelling, it's like an album that hits all the right notes, from a promising writer on the rise.
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A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie ElmhirstThe electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits. Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He's a loner, awkward and obsessive; she's charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream--as we all dream--of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive on the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can't run away from themselves. Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.
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Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America by Scott EllsworthFrom the author of the National Book Award longlisted title The Ground Breaking, a riveting new look at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, replete with evidence pointing to a much larger Confederate conspiracy. Told with a page-turning pace and eye-opening cast of characters, Ellsworth sets out to correct a pivotal moment of American history that we have gotten completely wrong--until now. Jam-packed with fresh, revelatory evidence, Ellsworth's research strongly infers that by the time that the houselights dimmed inside of Ford's Theatre on the evening of April 14th, 1865, Booth had been working alongside, if not in direct concert with, the Confederate Secret Service for nearly a year. Historians have long ignored that during the last ten months of the Civil War, the Confederacy launched a desperate, audacious war of terror against the North. In the North, Rebels attempted to derail trains, set buildings on fire, spread smallpox, and undermined public support for the Union army. Instead, history books and schools teach that John Wilkes Booth acted alone, was admired by neither side, and was a second-rate actor. This couldn't have been further from the truth: Booth was charming, a world-famous performer, and--most importantly--an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In the sweltering summer heat of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln had a front-row view of the Civil War, as he dodged firing bullets from the approaching Confederate army at Fort Stevens. It was the first time in American history that a sitting president would come under enemy fire, but the history books would put a far greater focus on his assassination just eight months later. In Midnight on the Potomac, Scott Ellsworth rewrites history, arguing that the two events were in fact connected and that Lincoln's assassination was likely ordered by leaders of the Confederate Army.
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The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature by Charlie EnglishFor nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the "CIA book program," which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's "book club" secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers' luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden's books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed. Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom--people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.
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A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen GillilandIn the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace and toppled Argentina's leader. The country was now under the control of a military junta, with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla at the helm. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from Argentina's people, who were tired of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta swiftly launched the National Reorganization Process or El Proceso--a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with "Western, Christian" values. The junta held power until 1983 and decimated a generation. One of the military's most diabolical acts was disappearing hundreds of pregnant women. Patricia Roisinblit was among them, a mother and leftist revolutionary labeled "subversive" and abducted while eight months pregnant with her second child. She gave birth in captivity, making one last call to her mother, Rosa, before she was never heard from again. Her newborn son was one of hundreds of babies secretly given to other families, many of them headed by police or military officers. For Rosa and other mothers of pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, their grief was twofold--the disappearances of their children, and the theft of their grandchildren. A group of fierce grandmothers formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them.
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We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate by Michael GrunwaldHumanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we'll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don't solve our food and land problems. In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It's an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it's also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done--and trying to do it. Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger's uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations--through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen HaoWhen AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong? Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations? Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.
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The Idaho Four: An American Tragedy by James PattersonThe murders of four innocent college students attending the University of Idaho left us all with so many questions.
Now, after more than 300 interviews, James Patterson and prize-winning journalist Vicky Ward finally have some answers.
We know what it was like to live in Moscow, Idaho, on November 13, 2022, the day of the cold-blooded killings.
We know what the local police and FBI did right. And what they did wrong.
We've learned so much about the four heartbroken families--the Mogens, Goncalveses, Kernodles, and Chapins.
And we have the backstory for Bryan Kohberger, brilliant grad student, loner, apparent incel--now indicted and facing trial.
Now you are the jury.
The evidence is in.
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How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence by Matt RichtelThe transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural, evolution-honed cycle that now faces radical change and challenge. The adolescent brain, sculpted for this transition over eons of evolution, confronts a modern world that creates so much social pressure as to regularly exceed the capacities of the evolving mind. The problem comes as a bombardment of screen-based information pelts the brain just as adolescence is undergoing a second key change: puberty is hitting earlier. The result is a neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain that can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It is a crisis that is part of modern life but can only be truly grasped through a broad, grounded lens of the biology of adolescence itself. Through this lens, Richtel shows us how adolescents can understand themselves, and parents and educators can better help.
For decades, this transition to adulthood has been defined by hormonal shifts that trigger the onset of puberty. But Richtel takes us where science now understands so much of the action is: the brain. A growing body of research that looks for the first time into budding adult neurobiology explains with untold clarity the emergence of the “social brain,” a craving for peer connection, and how the behaviors that follow pave the way for economic and social survival. This period necessarily involves testing—as the adolescent brain is programmed from birth to take risks and explore themselves and their environment—so that they may be able to thrive as they leave the insulated care of childhood.
Richtel, diving deeply into new research and gripping personal stories, offers accessible, scientifically grounded answers to the most pressing questions about generational change. What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?
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The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief by Tom Zeller Jr.Virtually everyone has experienced a headache—a nuisance arising from occasional stress or as payback for last night’s overindulgence. But for hundreds of millions of people, there are headaches, and then there are headaches. From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” chronic head pain can upend entire seasons of life. And perhaps owing to the ordinariness of the very word “headache,” these disorders are frequently trivialized.
In The Headache, veteran science journalist Tom Zeller Jr. takes readers on an odyssey both intimate and panoramic, through his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches and across the scientific landscape of a group of disorders that is—to the chagrin of sufferers—as much a curse as a cultural punchline. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and even experiments with psilocybin in search of relief. Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.
With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller’s search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an illuminating look at the nature of pain itself.
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