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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer’s *Dark Money* is a meticulous investigation of how conservative billionaires and private foundations built a political machine through think tanks, universities, legal networks, nonprofits, donor seminars, advocacy groups, climate campaigns, Tea Party infrastructure, campaign-finance litigation, and state-level power. Its central warning is not simply that rich people donate to politics. It is that…
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Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
Marc Goodman’s *Future Crimes* is a tour through the criminal possibilities built into a connected world: hacked phones, fragile infrastructure, data brokers, dark markets, smart homes, wearable sensors, medical implants, drones, 3-D printers, synthetic biology and AI. It is not anti-technology. It is anti-naivete. Goodman argues that crime scales wherever code, networks and incentives meet,…
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The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers
On American bases across Iraq and Afghanistan, the rubbish went into a hole — plastics, batteries, medical waste, human remains — and was set alight with jet fuel. Balad burned a hundred and forty-seven tons a day for seven years. Soldiers slept a few hundred yards downwind and were told the smoke was harmless. Joseph…
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A River in Darkness
In 1960, aged thirteen, Masaji Ishikawa was taken from Japan to North Korea with his family — part of a mass “repatriation” both governments wanted and the Japanese press called humanitarian. He got out thirty-six years later, alone, swimming a flooded river in the dark. This is his account of those years: the caste system…
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Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking
A Swiss family sat at the centre of the world’s biggest nuclear black market — and worked for the CIA the whole time. Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tell how American and British intelligence penetrated A. Q. Khan’s proliferation network, sabotaged the centrifuges it was building for Libya and Iran, and intercepted a freighter in…
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The Federalist Papers
Eighty-five newspaper essays written under deadline to swing one state’s ratifying vote — and the most durable account ever written of why free governments fail. Faction is incurable, so multiply it. Parchment limits are worthless, so set ambition against ambition. Men are not angels, so build for the men you have. Published anonymously as “Publius,”…
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A Promised Land
Volume one of Obama’s presidential memoir runs from a Hawaiian boyhood to the night the SEALs went into Abbottabad — with the 2008 campaign, the financial crisis, the Affordable Care Act, the *Deepwater Horizon* spill, and the Arab Spring in between. He meant to write five hundred pages in a year; it took three and…
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A Warning
Published anonymously in 2019 by “a senior official in the Trump administration,” this is the book-length version of the *New York Times* op-ed about a “Steady State” of appointees managing a president from inside his own government — written to announce that its author now thinks that thesis was wrong. Miles Taylor identified himself a…
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Animal Farm
One midsummer night the animals of the Manor Farm drive out their drunken owner, burn the whips and harnesses, and paint seven commandments on the barn wall, ending with the plainest: all animals are equal. The pigs, being cleverest, take charge of the reading and the writing. Then five buckets of milk go missing —…
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Reset
Why are America’s oldest Middle East partnerships — Saudi Arabia and Israel — still standing, and what would replace them? Kinzer’s answer is heresy told as history: the natural allies for the twenty-first century are Turkey and Iran, the only two Muslim powers in the region with a century of democratic struggle in their bones.…
An Official Ferrand Repository
Every book gives back