Jennifer Szalai

Furious Minds: The MAGA intellectuals and the rise of extremist ideas

How ideas that used to be the arcane obsessions of nerdy young men and buttoned-up tenured professors have become 'an engine and accelerant' for extremism

38 Londres Street: The case of Augusto Pinochet and the art of impunity

Impunity is the central theme of 38 Londres Street, a marvellous and absorbing new book by the British-French lawyer and author Philippe Sands

What happened in the 2024 election? Kamala Harris shares some thoughts

Harris was initially bewildered by Biden's sudden switch, including his determination to rush out an announcement

Victoria Woodhull: A tale of America's first female presidential candidate

Victoria Woodhull's improbable life - from clairvoyant to Wall Street broker to presidential candidate - is retold in Eden Collinsworth's witty new biography

'Who were the Nazis?': This book asks key questions about men behind Hitler

Richard J Evans' 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' is being justifiably lauded for its elegance and scope

Can a 1970s idea save democracy today?

Chandler deserves credit for refusing to relegate his book to the airy realm of wistful abstraction

Reports from MAGA frontlines

The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, a new book by Isaac Arnsdorf, a journalist at The Washington Post

The art of managing busyness

Slow Productivity is Newport's eighth book; he is also a professor of computer science at Georgetown and a contributing writer at The New Yorker

Bankman-Fried: From crypto hero to zero

The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect - especially now that Bankman-Fried's trial on fraud charges has begun

The elusive nature of reality

Egginton gestures at connections between the work of Heisenberg, Kant and Borges, between physics and metaphysics, fiction and fact

Global warming: The heat is on

This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time

From pest to ecosystem engineer

The writer Leila Philip adds to a genre of pro-beaver literature that turns out to be more populous than most of us may have known

Hoover: Bravery and black bag jobs

As the Yale historian Beverly Gage makes abundantly clear in G-Man, her revelatory new biography of Hoover, all of this is true

Measuring civilisation

The story of humans measuring things is no less than the story of civilisation - a claim that sounds like irritating hyperbole but in this case turns out to be true

The human factors

Gregg's clever and provocative book is full of irreverent notions and funny anecdotes - the creative upside to being a human animal

Life after Apartheid

This "mirror of graciousness" wasn't something that Malaika, for one, was especially interested in providing

A tour of non-human reality

The animals in Yong's book are mostly nonhuman, but scientists are necessarily part of his story too

Four women who took on the Oxford establishment

The biographical material in Metaphysical Animals is evocative and sparkling

Chilling tales of blasts, fallout and meltdowns

Atoms and Ashes recounts six accidents in detail, the first three connected to 'atoms for war' (bomb-making) and the last three connected to 'atoms for peace' (energy production)

The other Ukraine crisis

Yovanovitch was the child of immigrants who had fled the Soviets and the Nazis