Medieval scribes filled volumes called bestiaries with illustrations and descriptions of fantastic creatures. The manuscripts containing representations of these animals also depended on a menagerie of beasts: The covers of these and other volumes were fashioned from the skins of calves, goats, sheep, deer, pigs and, in some macabre instances, humans. Most of these hides…
Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife,…
So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that…
The article of which he was most proud was “The Woman Who Beat the Klan,” published in The Times Magazine in 1987, about Beulah Mae Donald, who sued the Ku Klux Klan for the 1981 murder of her son — he was hanged from a tree, with his throat slit, and no one was charged…
The Navy released the titles of 381 books on Friday evening that were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library on the Annapolis, Md., campus this week because their subject matter was seen as being related to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion topics. President Trump issued an executive order in January that banned D.E.I….
Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for The New York Times whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminated reporting from Tiananmen Square to the Bastille, and who wrote things as he saw them in 10 books driven by unflinching intellectual curiosity, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80. His death, in a…
No matter how you slice it, Liz Moore has arrived. This month, an adaptation of her blockbuster novel “Long Bright River” started streaming on Peacock. And her next book, “The God of the Woods,” now on the best-seller list for 36 weeks (and counting), will soon hit the million mark in sales — a distinction…
Nolen: The first TB patient that I sat down with in Nairobi was a man who had extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB — essentially there’s a just a very slim chance that the only drugs we know about will actually cure him. We’re out of options. And he’d come in that day, like he had…
The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the…
Herman Graf, a major and intrepid figure in independent publishing who sold copies of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” to bookstores after it was embroiled in a legal fight over whether it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Flushing, Queens. He was 91. His nephew Paul Lichter said the cause…