"A chill overtook me as I absorbed the details of Alicia's story. Alicia and Paco were members of a revolutionary organization, the Montoneros, Argentina's most consequential urban guerrilla group of the 1970s. I remembered that when news of Argentina's desaparecidos -- the disappeared -- began to be reported, I occasionally wondered what my fate might have been had my grandfather remained in Argentina. Here, on the screen before me, was one possible...

Overview: When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson's long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising...

In this rousing call to leadership, the self-described millennial spokesperson for the culture, CNN's designated "woke AF" former commentator, and the youngest national press secretary in the history of the United States shares her take-no-prisoners approach to life, politics, and career success, and shows a new generation how to be loud and powerful in their own right.Many people--most notably white older men--may try to stop Symone Sanders from...

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized Americas imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for...

"It's hard to think of a solo female recording artist who has been as revered or as reviled over the course of her career as Tori Amos. Amy Gentry argues that these violent aesthetic responses to Amos's performance, both positive and negative, are organized around disgust--the disgust that women are taught to feel, not only for their own bodies, but for their taste in music. Released in 1996, Amos's third album, Boys for Pele, represents the height...

The rich tradition of landscape design in the United States encompasses both simple eighteenth and early nineteenth century gardens and the lavish estates of the Gilded Age. Over time, and especially in the mid-twentieth-century, much of America's garden heritage was destroyed by creeping development and suburbanization. Thanks to the Garden Conservancy and other garden trusts and associations, this trend has been reversed and today many of these...

"Americans increasingly agree on one thing: Every day that Trump stays in office, he diminishes the United States and its people. In Trump Must Go, TV and radio host Bill Press offers 100 reasons why Trump needs to be removed from office, whether by impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or the ballot box. Beginning with the man himself and moving through Trump's executive action damage, Press covers Trump's debasement of the United States political system...

Here's something true for almost every American. The democracy you live in today is different, completely different, than the democracy born into. Since 1980, the number of Americans legally barred from voting has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, odds of living in a competitive Congressional district have fallen by more than half. In the twenty-first century alone, the amount of money spent on Washington lobbying has increased by more than 100...