The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

In The Project, award-winning journalist David A. Graham offers much-needed context and distills the essential elements of this sprawling document. Breaking down the Project’s strategy for transforming—and radically empowering—the executive branch, Graham then explains what the architects behind Project 2025 would do with that power: restoring traditional gender norms and the supremacy of the nuclear family, decimating the civil service, performing mass deportations, reducing corporate regulation and worker protections, and more.

More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to pose as foreign aristocrats, merchants, and students. Over time, this grew into the most ambitious espionage program in history. Many intelligence agencies use undercover operatives, but the KGB was the only one to go to such lengths, spending years training its spies in language and etiquette, and sending them abroad on missions that could last for decades. These spies were known as “illegals.”

For listeners of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.

Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.

With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping. At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground.

The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow.

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times.

Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon.

Frank, funny and open-hearted, You Never Know is an intimate memoir from one of the most beloved actors of our time, the highly personal story of a remarkable life and thoroughly accidental career. In his own voice and uniquely unpretentious style, the famed actor brings listeners on his uncharted but serendipitous journey to the top in Hollywood, his temptations and distractions, his misfires and mistakes and, over time, his well-earned success.

Known for providing incisive progressive political analysis without being dogmatic, popular radio and podcast host David Pakman delves into the vicious cycle of reactionary political ideology. It's no secret how the right-wing has benefited and capitalized off disinformation and polarization of US politics. Critical thinking and media literacy are on a rapid decline, and our republic is unable to agree upon a shared set of facts. Pakman challenges the right-wing head-on and encourages listeners to understand how the status quo became the status quo.

Spring, 1918. The Great War is at a crucial stage, the Germans are making one last push into France, and the Allies are struggling to hold them back. Battle lines are shifting, and men, and their machines, are being sent up and down the front to shore up defenses. Major Heathcliff Lennox, and his batman Greggs, are told to report to their new HQ. They set off on a sunlit day to fly the distance, but the enemy is never far away, and disaster strikes. They're sent crashing to the ground behind enemy lines, where life, death, and love await.

In the wake of World War II, with America ascendant and the Soviet Union devastated by the conflict, the Space Race should have been over before it started. But the underdog Soviets scored a series of victories—starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik and continuing in the years following--that seemed to achieve the impossible. It was proof, it seemed, that the USSR had manpower and collective will that went beyond America's material advantages. They had asserted themselves as a world power. But in The Wrong Stuff, John Strausbaugh tells a different story.

By day, Gary Heidnik was a man of God with money, charisma, and a growing congregation. But behind closed doors, he was building a torture chamber by hand and filling it with women.

Opening the Gates of Hell is based on over a decade’s research in archives and sites across Europe. It is a ground-breaking examination of the start of the Nazi–Soviet conflict, a narrative history not just of the fighting, but also the impact on civilians, the atrocities committed by both sides and ethnic cleansing carried out by the inhabitants of the regions invaded. This fascinating history tells the stories of bravery, cowardice, misery and horror through the eyes of those who were there including ordinary soldiers, generals, leaders, politicians and civilians on both sides.

The thrilling untold story of the trailblazing writer Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, who sounded the alarm about the rise of fascism in Europe while becoming enmeshed in the sensational case of a German serial killer stalking the streets of the French capital on the eve of WWII.

In her heyday, Stephanie St. Clair went by many names, but one was best known by all: Madame Queen. The undeniable queen of the Harlem numbers game, St. Clair redefined what it meant to be a woman of means. After immigrating to America from the West Indies, St. Clair would go on to manage one of the largest policy banks in all of Harlem by 1923. She knew the power of reputation, and even though her business was illegal gambling, she ran it like any other respectable entrepreneur. Because first and foremost, Madame Queen was a lady.

From the creators of the theory of ethical blindness comes an investigation into how corporate scandals happen, revealing the common pattern behind them and how your organization can avoid them.

Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way.

In 2011, a lone wolf named Slavc set out from his home territory of Slovenia on an epic journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he walked over a thousand miles. In Italy he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own—the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles—and when they mated, they formed the first pack to call these mountains home in over a century. Today there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.

Through its unforgettable characters and immersive storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today's oppressive anti-trans legislation.

The Citicorp Center, a fifty-nine-story skyscraper built in 1977, immediately became one of the most recognizable features on the New York City skyline with its distinctive inclined roof and oddly placed support columns. Designed by one of the top structural engineers in the field, William LeMessurier, the tower would become the crown jewel of his professional career; In essence, he created a skyscraper on stilts. The building was a modern marvel—until it was revealed that it had a one in sixteen chance of collapse.

Investigative journalist Paul Palango’s 22 Murders examined in forensic detail the shooting spree committed in April 2020 by Gabriel Wortman that began in tiny Portapique Bay, Nova Scotia, and ended thirteen hours later when Wortman was shot dead by RCMP officers. The episode left numerous serious questions in its wake—most especially why was the killer able to evade police in such limited geography for an entire night and much of the following morning?

From the moment an eccentric woman walked into the Knoedler Gallery with a Mark Rothko painting, everyone was fooled. For the next ten years, she ran an $80 million forgery ring, selling or consigning forty expertly crafted counterfeits claimed to be the works of Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others. Director of the documentary Made You Look Barry Avrich reveals new information, evidence, and inside stories about how a quixotic art dealer, master forger, and two cunning con artists managed to fool billionaire art collectors, journalists, and esteemed art appraisers.

MAYA BLUE: A Memoir of Survival is Working Girl meets Taken, a true story of love, cocaine, abduction, and survival, and in the end, Brenda Coffee is the last one standing. Recipient of the coveted Kirkus starred review and nominated for the prestigious 2025 Kirkus Prize, MAYA BLUE is a memoir that reads like a thriller, a compelling, fast-paced story that underscores the power of our voice. "It was a fairy tale until it wasn't... " For a long time, that's what successful businesswoman Brenda Coffee told herself whenever she dared to look back on her twenties and thirties.

In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of Hobby Lobby, announced a purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.

Now, the fruits of Chas Henry's exhaustive four-year, two-continent investigation provide insight into what many have called the United States Marine Corps' worst-ever peacetime disaster. Fuji Fire shares the compelling and intimate stories of heartbreak and inspiration forged by these events while bringing to light new, critical analyses of the incident's causes and effects.

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.