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Note: Join us on Monday, October 19, at Powell's Books on Hawthorne for a reading with Roy Scranton. A pilgrim arrives on a devastated planet. The destruction has been extreme, the planet's transformation almost complete. Once a gentle, temperate environment in which intelligent, tool-using, bipedal primates thrived, it has become a choking sauna, wet and [...]

In ancient Athens, during the fifth century BC, military service was required of all citizens. To be a citizen meant being a soldier, and vice versa. Because every citizen served in the military, the health of the democracy depended upon the health of its soldiers, and the ability of citizen-soldiers to move fluidly and frequently [...]

As a teenager, I didn't pay much attention to posted signs. I was a strange kid — both very confident and very lost. My façade, my own sign posted for the world, was a lie and I knew it. But I believed if I could just be patient enough, a kind of secret door would [...]

As a national security reporter, I write about war, weapons, security, and secrets. The question most commonly asked of me is, "How do you get sources to talk to you?" The Pentagon's Brain is my third book in a series about seemingly impenetrable subjects. The first one, Area 51, is about the highly classified military [...]

My first job was as a babysitter when I was 11. Now that I'm a parent and look at the 11-year-olds I know, one of whom is still dressed by her mother in the morning, this fact appalls me. It's true that when I was 11 I looked 14 and the parents must have been [...]

I was crying or almost crying for most of Fun Home: The Musical — I already loved Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, and I've always been a sucker for the way musicals make melodrama catchy. The song that got me most was "Ring of Keys," a song about a primal moment of identification: Sydney Lucas, playing [...]

Note: Join us at Powell's City of Books on Saturday, August 29, for an author event with Ellen Urbani. I have an uncommon penchant for aligning myself with disaster and death. Tornadoes and wildfires and armed guerrillas have chased me. Riptides have caught me. Earthquakes have knocked down the walls around me. Pestilence has rained upon [...]

Note: Join us at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing on Wednesday, September 16, for an author event with Cara Nicoletti. As a kid, I read for two reasons: the first, and most common, was to escape from my everyday life by imagining a different one — to read about people and places that I [...]

When people learn that I recently spent a long summer riding 2,000 miles across the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon pulled by mules, they invariably ask the same question: "How did the adventure change you?" Unspoken, but deep implications are embedded in that question, especially from family and friends. Maybe I have stopped drinking [...]

The most frequent question readers ask about An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is "Why hasn't this book been written before?" I'm flattered by that question, because it's the one I ask about texts that deeply move me; at the same time the information, argument, or story is new to me, it seems [...]

Writing a book is an unnatural act of communication.Writing a book is an unnatural act of communication. Speaking to a person, or even to an audience, is an interaction. Very different styles are suited to an expert, a curious layperson, or a student on assignment... or to a one-on-one, a salon, or a lecture theater. When we [...]

When I was in grad school, a teacher told our workshop that if a published novel is 300 pages, the writer had to generate 1,200 along the way. I didn't buy it. Maybe it took this teacher 1,200 pages to find the right 300, but I would never have to produce such excess. I'd maybe [...]

A fellow writer wants to know more about something I've written, something centering on a child's body at the center of the storm of war. She asks, "Why bring violence and sexuality so close to the body of a child?" Her eyes blur and magnify when she says it. I can hear the flutter of [...]

My decision to embark on The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, began with a question. I'd been practicing yoga since my mid-20s, when I spent six months in India. Returning to New York, I launched a career as a political journalist, regularly covering [...]

My plan here is to write about how New York City disappears out from under your feet.My plan here is to write about how New York City disappears out from under your feet. So I wanted to include a picture of Apocalypse Lounge, a bar in Alphabet City I began to frequent right after college. [...]

Previous to Saint Mazie, I've only ever written about characters I've made up from scratch before. Then I read an essay by Joseph Mitchell in his wonderful collection Up in the Old Hotel, and I became entranced by the idea of writing about a real person: Mazie Phillips aka The Queen of the Bowery. She [...]

With the famous phrase "Nature, red in tooth and claw," the Victorian poet Tennyson expressed the challenge that the emerging science of evolution posed to his faith in a universe ruled by love and compassion. Yet in today's science, all the in-depth studies show that violence has diminished continually over the past few centuries (as [...]

People have been asking why I wanted to write about Andrew Jackson and the Cherokees. To be more precise, they ask: Why did you want to write about that? My day job is to write not history but "the first draft of history," which is what people sometimes call the news. I work for NPR, [...]

When I was in graduate school at Berkeley I was offered a prestigious fellowship to study for a year in Germany, but I decided it would be a disruption, so I wrote a short note declining the offer. As, letter in hand, I stepped to the mailbox, I bumped into a woman from the scholarship [...]

When I was a college sophomore, I thought everything I needed to know could be learned from a book. My best friend, Claire*, and I decided to create an independent study on the topic that most fascinated and confounded us at that age: love. We spent hours planning the syllabus in her second-floor single, with [...]

In the summer of 2012, I got a contract for a book about language, based on my experiences of more than 30 years as a copy editor at The New Yorker. I was thrilled, because now I had license to buy all the books about language that I wanted. That September, I was driving on [...]

When I was a teenager in Colorado during the late '90s, I liked to climb 14ers — 14,000-foot mountains. I'd often hike with friends, and at the top we'd take a photograph of ourselves standing on the summit. We'd set the camera on a rock and use the timer function, or, if another hiker happened [...]

I first heard of Fritz Haber in 1998, when I caught a snippet of a TV documentary about 20th-century scientists. The camera zoomed in on an image of a bald man in a military uniform, a pair of pince nez clamped to the bridge of his nose. He looked like a stereotypical German nationalist circa [...]

When I tell people I've spent the last three years working on a book about Atlantis, they usually have two questions. The first almost always goes unspoken: Are you nuts? (I don't think so, but perhaps I'd be the last to know.) The follow-up question — which almost always does get asked — is where [...]

At first, I was dead set against it. I would not try to meet Nicholson Baker while I was writing a book about Nicholson Baker. I had a good reason for this. I didn't want to meet Baker because Baker, in U and I, his fretful, hand-wringing account of his literary relationship with John Updike, [...]