Featuring a new introduction and a “Back Home” afterword, Shortest Way Home is Pete Buttigieg’s inspirational story that challenges our perception of the typical American politician.The meteoric rise of the mayor of a small Midwest city, who defied every pundit’s odds with his electrifying run for the presidency, created one of the most surprising candidacies in recent American history. The fact that his New York Times best-selling memoir, Shortest Way...

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg demonstrates how a breakdown of trust has brought our nation to the brink of disaster—and how its restoration for all can reclaim America’s future.In a century warped by terrorism, Trumpist populism, systemic racism, financial collapse, and a global pandemic, trust—in our institutions, in each other, and in the American project itself—has precipitously eroded. We are now experiencing the disastrous consequences of a “crisi...

A mayor's inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal.Once described by the Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of," Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to ...

Pete Buttigieg demonstrates how a breakdown of trust is central to our nation’s current predicament—and how our future depends on finding ways to instill confidence in the American project, and in each other.Trust is the essential foundation of America’s democracy, asserts Pete Buttigieg, former presidential candidate and bestselling author of Shortest Way Home. In a century shaped by terrorism, financial collapse, Trumpist populism, global pandemic, and s...

The preeminent historian of the American Revolution explains why it remains the most significant event in our history.More than almost any other nation in the world, the United States began as an idea. For this reason, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood believes that the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American identity is so fluid and not based on any universally shared heritage, we have had to continual...

**"A world-class intellectual. . . . [Colin Woodard’s] research can help Americans rediscover their common identity in spite of all the attempts to divide them." —Garry Kasparov"A powerful paradigm for understanding the defining hot button issues of contemporary America and the action we can take to bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic." —The Next Big Idea Club“A lucid exercise in political geography with tremendous—and disturbing—explanatory power.” —Kir...

It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern W...

From the best-selling author of These Truths, a work that examines the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation," in part because postmodernism h...

**"A world-class intellectual. . . . [Colin Woodard’s] research can help Americans rediscover their common identity in spite of all the attempts to divide them." —Garry Kasparov"A powerful paradigm for understanding the defining hot button issues of contemporary America and the action we can take to bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic." —The Next Big Idea Club“A lucid exercise in political geography with tremendous—and disturbing—explanatory power.” —Kir...

Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid—part history, part biography, part philosophy— consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains incalculable. Louis Menand masterfully weaves pivotal late 19th-and early 20th-century events, colorful biographical anecdotes, and abstract ideas into a narrative whole that both enthralls and enlightens...

**A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEARAn extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers: "Excellent, short, and highly readable.... Traces a grittier story of a life lived almost entirely in a small area of what is now eastern Algeria, where Augustine’s local origins and experience profoundly shaped both his life and his thought. Conybeare’s argument is that because of his contributions to the genres of philosophy, au...

Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with color...