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On April 23, 2016, a warning went up in a comment thread beneath a blog entry about the ugly laws: the ADA is in danger, and the disabled are being propelled backward. Ten years later came the memorandum that proved the warning right. Back to Willowbrook is the record of how America taught itself to see disabled people as citizens, and of how fast that teaching is being unlearned.

To recant is to take back a belief in public, under pressure, in front of the people who demanded the reversal. The word carries an older sense underneath the modern one. It comes from the Latin for singing again, and the act it names is a song performed backward, on command, so that the saying can stand in for the truth. In My Mind I'm Standing Up is a history of that act, traced from the Inquisition and the Reformation through the Moscow show trials, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Maoist struggle session, and into the public apology of our own moment.

In the spring of 1973, a teacher in a Lincoln, Nebraska classroom handed an eight-year-old boy a blue armband marked S, for slave, and set the brown-eyed children over him for the day. The next morning the roles reversed. No one in that room was Black. The lesson, the teacher said, was empathy.

Everyone is your friend now. The word that once required an altar can be had for a thumb. For fifty years, David Boles ran his life on one blanket rule: if I know you, you are my friend. Then an actor he calls Curtis said six words in a rehearsal room, and a laugh came out where a sentence should have been, a sentence thirty years in the carrying. This book opens that ledger and refuses to close it politely.

An argument against rule by the dead. In January of the year 897, the reigning pope had his predecessor's corpse pulled from its tomb, dressed in full vestments, propped upright, and put on trial in Rome. A deacon answered the prosecution in the dead man's voice, and the sentence was carried out on the body. History treats the Cadaver Synod as a medieval freak show. Barbarous Ancestors treats it as a method, and follows that method into the marble courtroom where it now decides American life.

The conquest of Native America is usually told as two thefts, the theft of the land and the killing of the people. Beyond the Burial Tree adds a third, harder to see because it left no acreage and no body count: the seizure of a people's authority over its own dead. The right to decide how the dead are mourned, where they rest, and whether they remain present to the living was carried off along with the ground and the lives, and that taking is the subject of this book. David Boles tells it through the people whose river raised him.

You have heard that the human attention span has fallen below a goldfish's. It is one of the most quoted statistics of the digital age, repeated in TED talks and tenth-grade classrooms, in newspaper trend pieces and the pitch decks of companies selling a cure for the affliction they just named. The claim has a single defect its champions rarely raise. There was never a study. There was never a goldfish. The number was invented, and a century took it as a verdict on itself. The Eighteen-Minute Lie is the biography of that lie.

On January 30, 2026, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed its Articles of Dissolution with the District of Columbia. The federation that had carried American public broadcasting from the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act through fifty-eight years of programming, political contestation, and federal appropriation reached its legal end. UNDERWRITTEN is the first full institutional history of that federation.

Two words in red ink killed a screenplay and began a book. In 1985 a young dramatist sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to a historian for review. It came back with BAD DRAMA scrawled across the title page, and the play was buried. Forty years later the writer went back to find out whether the verdict had fallen on his work or on the man he had dared to take seriously.

In the fall of 1984, in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two professors offered competing arguments about why beauty matters. The art historian said beauty connects. The film scholar said beauty instructs. Both were right, and both were incomplete. The question that has taken forty years to formulate is the question this book attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection, and who writes the lesson plan? The Human Universal Beautiful proposes a new framework for understanding how beauty operates as a historical force.

The Brittle Self is a history of one of the oldest fears a mind can hold: that the self is fragile, that it can be seen through, broken, switched off, or shown to be unreal. Across six hundred years the fear holds steady while its costume keeps changing, and the book follows that single dread from a medieval palace to a present-day clinic. It begins in 1393, when Charles the Sixth of France forbade his court to touch him, certain his body had turned to glass and would shatter at a careless hand.

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator's hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted clay and several days of labor into a working monster, and the figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for a fee. The specific contract has not survived.

In the Republic of Buryatia, in southern Siberia, the funerals come in a steady cadence. Since February 2022, Buryatia has supplied combat soldiers to the war in Ukraine at a per-capita rate among the highest of any region in the Russian Federation. Buryatia is also among the poorest regions of the federation. The young men who die in this war come from the internal periphery, far from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian state has chosen to spend them rather than invest in them. That is the politics of tribute.

Ischia is Burning is a novel I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the homesteading provisions in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim.

Bologna, the 1920s. Giorgio Morandi spends his working life in a small room at 36 Via Fondazza, painting the same bottles and boxes from a low shelf. The objects barely change. The arrangements barely change. What changes across forty years is what Morandi sees in the space between the bottles. London, the 1830s. Michael Faraday spends his working life arranging iron filings on paper around magnets, watching how the patterns shift when the magnets shift. The filings are mundane. The magnets are common.

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists. Twenty years later, Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement: photography belongs in the museum of records, not the gallery of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right. The Scientific Aesthetic begins with that double judgment and works through its consequences.

A pharmacist's grandson discovers that art is the oldest prescription in Western civilization. For twenty-five centuries, from the Theatre of Dionysus to the infinite scroll on your phone, institutional art has functioned not as a liberating force but as a sedative: an analgesic for the pain of consciousness that keeps the patient still while the conditions producing the pain remain untouched. The beauty is real. The emotions are real. The catharsis is real. And the function of all of it is pharmacy. They can't help but stand. You are standing now. You just don't know it yet.

Walk south on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta on any Tuesday morning in 2026, and you will pass through more layers of surveillance than a federal inmate encountered in a maximum-security facility in 1975. You will not feel them. That is the point. Carceral Nation traces three centuries of surveillance, discipline, and control as they migrated from the prison yard to the schoolroom, the workplace, the digital platform, and the public square.

In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. In 1885, a Bohemian immigrant family purchases the land, never knowing who built the house they now call home. In 1993, Marcus Cole arrives at the prison built on that same ground. Over fifteen years, he learns the story of the man who first claimed it.