Sympathy for the Gavin

Unprincipled triangulation and a stained blue dress notwithstanding, one of Bill Clinton’s more irksome legacies is that of presidential wannabes showcasing their personal tales of woe, as if leading the free world is an audition for a daytime talk show.

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This Emperor Had Clothes

History has been kind to Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161-180 A.D. Born to a patrician family in 121 A.D., his father died when he was three or four, but his mother Domitia Lucilla, a woman of remarkable intellect, saw the high potential in her son and acquired the best tutors for him. Marcus' intellectual gifts became evident early—the Emperor Hadrian referred to him as Verissimus, or most truthful one. The mercurial Hadrian, who spent his last years in illness and paranoia, took on an extraordinary man, Antoninus Pius, almost his exact reverse in talent and temperament, to help rule the empire. Antoninus in turn adopted Marcus, which assured his own rise to the emperorship after the death of Antoninus in 161.

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Don't Fork It Over Yet

Between remembering and forgetting, treasuring and tossing out, feeling without sentimentalizing… These are the spaces Bee Wilson navigates with the precision of a drafting pen in her collection of memento stories, The Heart-Shaped Tin.

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Always in Front of the Servants

Paul Burrell was a footman to Queen Elizabeth II from 1976 to 1987, and then an eyewitness to the marriage of Prince Charles, who is now King Charles III, and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who is now beatified as a human sacrifice to the House of Windsor. The Royal Insider is a cattily camp, tittle-tattling tell-all in the finest traditions of royal biography. It is also an autobiography, self-serving in its shameless autotherapy. Serious scholars of Windsor whispering may be tempted to skim the story of Burrell’s lonely childhood and troublesome prostate, the faster to gorge on his generous dollops of behind-the-scenes gossip. That would be a mistake. The Royal Insider is a study in the psychology of service.

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Crime and the Criminologists

Since its inception as an academic discipline, criminology has concerned itself first and foremost with the question of why people commit crime. Beginning with their earliest research, criminologists gathered extensive data on large groups of people to try to disentangle which variables predicted offending. With sufficiently large samples and adequate measurements, these criminologists thought, they could determine why some people commit lots of crime, while others commit none at all.

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A Lexicon for the Linguistically Curious

Ever wonder what the six teeth on all Venetian gondolas signify? (The six districts of Venice.) Or why and how chicken wing flats are stripped out to form a "meat umbrella" during competitive eating contests? (Much easier to consumer them faster.) Or why some movie stars are credited as "with" or "and"? (They indicate a major star playing a small but significant role.) Or where the "V for Victory" originated? (Occupied Belgium in 1941, as a warning to the Nazis.) Then Ben Schott's Significa is just the book for you.

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The Slavery Story You Won’t Learn in School

For historians of human enslavement—and for black Africans more generally—the recently concluded African Nations soccer cup revealed images of an ugliness that has roots in the Muslim world's trans-Saharan slave trade. As Senegal defeated host Morocco in the final, sections of the Moroccan crowd hurled racial insults at the Senegalese—just as Algerian spectators had, earlier in the tournament, when their team was beaten by Nigeria. "Get the black slave," affronted Algerian soccer fans chanted.

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Time to Man Up

Scott Galloway can be annoying. In his book, Notes on Being a Man, he admits as much. A serial entrepreneur, popular podcast host, and marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Galloway is also not especially humble, but age and the experience of raising two boys prompted him to revisit his own childhood and to consider what it means to be a man in the 21st century. The picture he paints is grim: He sees "a generation of young men from all backgrounds who are (a) unbearably lonely, (b) not economically viable, (c) not emotionally viable, and (d) basically adrift."

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Stiff Competition

This book explores not death itself, but what remains after it: the human body. For most species, the dead simply decay where they fall. Humans, however, have long venerated their deceased, which explains the visceral disgust evoked by acts like body desecration, grave robbing, or unauthorized dissection. The book’s title nods to the "Doctors’ Riot" of 1788, a violent uprising in New York City triggered when teenage boys spotted a dissected arm dangling from a window at what would become Columbia University’s medical school. An enraged mob stormed the school and hospital, forcing doctors and staff to flee and hide in a nearby prison for safety. Order was restored only through the intervention of prominent figures like Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

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A Book to Sink Your Teeth Into

Brian Raftery's investigation of the serial killer, cannibal, gourmand, and pop cultural icon Hannibal Lecter is a very good book that sounds as if it should be a very bad one. When I first heard that Raftery, a respected entertainment journalist, was writing what purported to be a biography of Lecter, I both groaned and wondered about copyright law. After all, Lecter's creator Thomas Harris is still alive, and the four novels he has written that feature the character—Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising—remain perennially popular, selling tens of thousands of copies a year in the United States alone. Was Hannibal Lecter: A Life going to be some accursed piece of fan fiction, unaccountably published by a major house and leading the opportunistic Raftery to deserve a visit from a hungry, understandably aggrieved Dr. Lecter some dark and stormy night?

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