Portside

Sarah Bakewell’s sweeping new survey of the philosophical tradition, “Humanly Possible,” says that putting your faith in human behavior means confronting complacency and nihilism — but it can be worth it.

An essay collection centering on issues facing feminism today, the author calls on the movement to be “relentlessly truth-telling, not least about itself,” focusing on consent, intersectionality, misogyny, gendered violence, and other topics.

New biography of Mildred Harnack, born in Milwaukee. She was a central part of the anti-Nazi resistance movement inside Nazi Germany, until her capture in 1942. Sentenced to hard labor, she was re-tried under Hitler's order, and executed.

The late New Yorker staff writer focused on divided selves and the complexity of relationships. Adept with the power of words, she was unsentimental about them, writing as if one could say something crushing without leaving that person crushed.

With plagues, political dysfunction and near-Dickensian economic differences rampant, a Mother Jones editor charts the lives of the super rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all.

A portrait of the exploitative, homicidal racial dynamics lying at the nation’s core, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis.

Adam Hochschild here produces a rich biography of the World War One-era socialist insurgent, Russian Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor Stokes, an impoverished cigar worker who counterintuitively married well and never forsook her working class roots.

McDonald’s came to play a growing role in black communities, offering not only food and jobs but also sponsorships ranging from funds for the local Little League team to grants for the N.A.A.C.P.