Sen. Chris Murphy has a sense of what ails America, and he wants to restore its spiritual core.
Books
Read reviews of nonfiction books on policy, politics and power
Who Died When Elon Musk Killed USAID?
Nicholas Enrich’s new memoir details the human toll of the agency’s dismantling.
How Israel Got This Way
A new book by a genocide scholar traces the roots of the nation’s descent.
What, Exactly, Is a Fair Wage?
Arindrajit Dube brilliantly dissects how wages really are set—but overlooks the particular hurdles that care workers face.
Vertical Vertigo
Brian Callaci’s book describes the deregulatory strategies franchisors use to protect their profits.
The Legacy of the Subway Vigilante
Two new books reveal how a 1980s shooting reflected rising right-wing attitudes in a rapidly gentrifying New York.
Capital Ideas
Two books on the history of capitalism provide lessons for how to tame it.
‘Cadillac Desert’ Reconsidered
Marc Reisner’s 1986 book demonstrates how a hypertrophic judiciary combines with America’s deadlocked legislature to make vast swaths of Western water policy dependent on 19th-century legal norms.
The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators
Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users.
Artifice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
To understand the tech mindset is to see that the ultimate goal is domination. Silicon Valley elites apply a different standard to themselves because, quite simply, they believe that they deserve a different set of rules and expectations.

