Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once

I was supposed to have gone on a trip to Israel earlier this month. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my plans owing to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East. One thing I had been especially looking forward to was a visit to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv to see 20 & 20: A Lens of Her Own , an exhibition about trailblazing Jewish women photographers and their contemporary successors. Maybe I'll still get to see it before it closes, but until then

Here in New York City, it's still very cold and icy outside following this past weekend's blizzard. So, what better way to contemplate the elements than to snuggle up with a book about an even colder and snowier place — the Nordics! Extreme North , a 2022 book by historian Bernd Brunner, promises a sweeping cultural history of the world's northernmost regions. I wasn't familiar with this book until I picked up a copy in the sale section at my local bookstore. I’ve been intere

Roxie Laybourne is probably a name that you do not know. Thanks to the wonderful and deeply researched biography The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney, I hope that many more people will meet this remarkable 20th century pioneer of science. This book was published in 2025, and it is the newest book I have written about since launching this blog. Roxie, as everyone called her, almost singlehandedly invented the fi