Lea Ypi’s memoir recounts Albania’s troubled transition to democracy.

Some actors go to extremes to get into character. It wasn’t meant to be that way.

“To Paradise” shows little interest in the big questions it asks.

What turned Smedley Butler into a critic of American foreign policy?

Why do the Transcendentalists still have an outsize influence on American culture?

The author of “Crime and Punishment” had a love-hate relationship with the true-crime obsessions of his era.

Pedro Almodovar’s new movie with Penelope Cruz is his most explicitly political.

Biographers get distracted by the photographer’s unusual life story—to the point of diminishing her work itself.

Who Peter Thiel is does not really matter. What matters about him is whom he connects.

Hernan Cortes, Captain Cook, and Prince Philip were each worshiped as deities—with very different consequences.

Monica Black’s new book, “A Demon-Haunted Land,” tells of the faith healers who prospered in post-war Germany.

Forty years ago, on the barricades for radical feminism, I set out to “prove” she was overrated.

The final installment in John Richardson’s mammoth biography reveals the artist’s fiendish control over his admirers.

Lazy assumptions about young and old cloud our politics.

Joanna Hogg’s film treat a young artist’s coming of age with disarming seriousness.

What made her so interested in cold-blooded, apparently motiveless killers?

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new history of humanity looks for the origins of authoritarianism and freedom.

Set at an upscale midcentury magazine, the new movie is an ode to print and a slice of escapism.

His new book refuses to recognize that the court is political.

The perils of turning the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade into a political symbol