How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings - and especially for women? Because, when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

A book like no other, I Am Maria weaves Shriver’s hard-earned wisdom with her own deeply personal poetry. I Am Maria reminds listeners there is strength and love on the other side of all of our hardest days.

Hannah Selinger chronicles her rise and fall in the restaurant business, beginning with the gritty hometown pub where she fell in love with the industry and ending with her final post serving celebrities at the Hamptons classic Nick & Toni’s. In between, listeners will join Selinger on her emotional journey as she learns the joys of fine fine dining, the allure and danger of power, and what it takes to walk away from a career you love when it no longer serves you.

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated.

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?”

The author of the celebrated Victory tells the fascinating story of the intertwined lives of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women to serve as Supreme Court justices.

The right idea, invoked at the right time, can change our lives. Drawing from her long studies of happiness, and also from the challenges she’s faced herself, writer Gretchen Rubin has discovered the “Secrets of Adulthood” that can help us manage the complexities of life. To convey her conclusions, she turned to the aphorism—the ancient literary discipline that demands that a writer convey a large truth in a few words.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

The midlife crisis is the butt of so many jokes, but this long-derided life stage has an upside. What if we could reframe our thinking about the natural transition of midlife not as a crisis, but as a chrysalis—a time when something profound awakens in us, as we shed our skin, spread our wings, and pollinate our wisdom? In Learning to Love Midlife, Chip Conley offers an alternative narrative to the way we commonly think of our 40s, 50s and 60s. Drawing on the latest social science research, inspiring stories, and timeless wisdom, he reveals 12 reasons why life gets better with age.

The trial of Dominique Pelicot has captured the world's attention. Behind Pelicot's unthinkable crimes are a mother, Gisèle Pelicot, and her daughter, Caroline Darian, who were forced to rebuild their lives. This is their story.

From Vanity Fair and The New York Times contributor comes a beautifully written, deeply felt memoir recounting the solo cross-country journey she made along the Ten across the American southwest: a mission to uncover both what harrowing violence may or may not have happened to her late mother, but also, to look within and discover who she herself is—where her mother ends and she begins.

She is one of the most recognizable women of our time. America knows Jane Fonda as an actress and an activist, a feminist and a wife, a workout guru and a role model. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, Fonda reveals that she is so much more. From her youth among Hollywood's elite and her early film career to the challenges and triumphs of her life today, Jane Fonda reveals intimate details and universal truths.

Though Anderson Cooper has always considered himself close to his mother, his intensely busy career as a journalist for CNN and CBS affords him little time to spend with her. After she suffers a brief but serious illness at the age of ninety-one, they resolve to change their relationship by beginning a yearlong conversation unlike any they have ever had before. The result is a correspondence of surprising honesty and depth in which they discuss their lives, the things that matter to them, and what they still want to learn about each other.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone. Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers, including Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, to join him in finding someone doing an interesting job for the government and writing about them.

Amanda Knox spent nearly four years in prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit—and became a notorious tabloid story in the process. Though she was exonerated, it’s taken more than a decade for her to reclaim her identity and truly feel free. Free recounts how Knox survived incarceration, the mistakes she made and misadventures she had reintegrating into society, and culminates in the as-yet-untold story of her return to Italy and the extraordinary relationship she went on to build with the man who sent her to prison.

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings - and especially for women? Because, when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

After losing her high school sweetheart, Ryan, a California firefighter, in the line of duty, Jennifer was left to rebuild her life as a young widow with two children. Struggling to navigate grief and questioning God’s plan, Jennifer’s journey takes an unexpected turn when she meets Michael, a firefighter from Northern Ireland, years later at an event in California. Despite the odds and miles between them, their undeniable connection reveals a shared history, launching them into an unplanned, but divinely orchestrated, future together.

A book like no other, I Am Maria weaves Shriver’s hard-earned wisdom with her own deeply personal poetry. I Am Maria reminds listeners there is strength and love on the other side of all of our hardest days.

Life is nothing other than a series of transitions. Whether you’re graduating from college and trying to decide what’s next, coping with divorce, putting the pieces back together after a death or a diagnosis, moving to a new city, or thinking about leaving one career path for another, these transitions—planned or unplanned—are an inevitable part of life. But as inevitable as transitions are, they can still be intimidating. You’re venturing from the familiar into the unfamiliar, and that journey is often murky and filled with moments of uncertainty, grief, and self-doubt.

In the blink of an eye, our kids will be adults facing countless serious threats—climate change, gun violence, political polarization, and disinformation, to name but a few. We’re not going to be able to solve all these intractable problems before our kids grow up—so how are we to prepare them for an impossibly complex and scary future? Plagued by this question, award-winning science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer interviewed parenting experts and researchers across multiple fields—psychology, education, information literacy, technology, business, and even addiction.

If You Were My Daughter is a story of learning to hear your own voice, of one daughter's return to wholeness, and a story of accepting that a mother's best can still fall far too short. Richmond illuminates how the stories we're born into shape the ones we tell about ourselves—and reminds us that we have the powerful permission to develop a new relationship with what is difficult in our lives.

From Vanity Fair and The New York Times contributor comes a beautifully written, deeply felt memoir recounting the solo cross-country journey she made along the Ten across the American southwest: a mission to uncover both what harrowing violence may or may not have happened to her late mother, but also, to look within and discover who she herself is—where her mother ends and she begins.

In Moral Ambition, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They're the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled.

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.

An Olympic athlete. An award-winning novelist. A successful entrepreneur. All raised under one roof. What can we learn from those families whose children aim high and succeed, sometimes in widely varied fields? Just as important: What were the costs along the way, and what can we glean from their travails and triumphs? The acclaimed New York Times journalist Susan Dominus offers compelling profiles of six such families in search of the factors that led to their success—was it an inherited quality, a specific way of parenting, the influence of a sibling, or a twist of luck?

How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.

From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.

Finding joy and laughter in the mundane can be challenging at times, but Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo have mastered the art of not taking life too seriously. Brought together under the bright lights of reality television, these best friends bonded in incredibly intense circumstances. They quickly came to realize that one of the bedrocks of their friendship is their shared experience with social anxiety. As their friendship deepened, they found themselves constantly devolving into laughter, earning them the nickname “The Giggly Squad,” and with that, their superpower was born.

In 1974, a twenty-year-old Christie Brinkley was “discovered” outside a Paris phone booth, which set off a meteoric modeling career that would land her on the covers of hundreds of magazines and cement her legacy as an All-American icon. Although she’s lived more than fifty years in the public eye, the full story of her roller-coaster life has never been told. Now, for the first time, Christie shares what life has been like, both in front of and behind the cameras