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History and Current Events August 2026 |
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What would drive a man to exhume the body of his daughter and remove her heart? That question has haunted Aaron Mahnke, creator and host of the award-winning podcast Lore. Fueled by a decade of research, Mahnke excavates the past to understand the hysteria that fueled the ghastly exhumation of Mercy Brown in 1892, who like her mother and sister before her, succumbed to “consumption” at the age of 19. With Exhumed, Mahnke presents a unique history of the intersection of folklore and science, and how pop culture and both genuine medical advancements and pseudoscience of the time shaped the perspectives of people in 19th century America. From the death of George Washington to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, Mahnke leads reads on a fascinating journey through history, touching on methods of mummification, the multifaceted role of executioners, medicine made from corpses, European folklore that traveled across the Atlantic, and so much more. He reveals that as shocking as Brown’s exhumation might seem, it also reflected surprisingly common attitudes and beliefs about the relationship between the dead and the living, the nature of science and magic, and the fate of a human soul. It all builds to a revelatory understanding of human behavior that continues to this very day.
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| Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela ColloffJournalist Pamela Colloff's disturbing debut chronicles the exploits of con man Paul Skalnik, a jailhouse informant in 1980s Florida whose unreliable testimonies led to multiple wrongful convictions for his fellow inmates, including four men who wound up on death row. Try this next: Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida by Gilbert King. |
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The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
by Jill Lepore
Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity. --Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget
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| I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World by Sarah WilsonIn her bracing follow-up to This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World, bestselling author Sarah Wilson draws upon conversations with philosophers, poets, futurists, scientists, and more, offering insights on how to find joy amid humanity's uncertain future. Try this next: Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp. |
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