Siegfried Kracauer believed movies could offer early warnings of political disaster.

Franklin Foer’s bestselling 2004 book helped sell soccer to Americans thanks in part to a defense of globalization.

In scrutinizing our relationship with the natural world, his classic works helped us to better understand ourselves.

Virginia Woolf put forward an enduring vision of women with the space and financial stability to write. But it’s also a sad vision—of isolated writers, cut off from peers or mentors.

Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace “shitty first drafts.” But there’s more to the creative process.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death posited that we act out in antisocial ways—and even embrace authoritarians—because we cannot face our own unavoidable demise.

The Cycles of American History foresaw American voter dealignment, and an electronic age that would see voters prioritize personality over party—but it didn’t anticipate Trump.

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.

For all of its faults and weaknesses, no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it.

“Hons and Rebels” might easily be mistaken for a freewheeling memoir of aristocratic life. It’s also a study of intense ideological conflict in a family.

Where some celebrated the triumph of liberal capitalism in the 1990s, Hobsbawm saw a failed dream.

The diaries changed Che Guevara’s image from toughened fighter to sensitive, less certain young man.

Lucy Grealy’s 1994 bestseller has become part of a larger story of literary friendship and the boundaries between artists and their work.

“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is an enduring work—just not of history.

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

Classic works, reconsidered

Joseph Weizenbaum’s underrated book “Computer Power and Human Reason” cautioned against confusing people with machines.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” sparked a revolution in end-of-life care. But soon she began to deny mortality altogether.

What Benedict Anderson’s classic account of nationalism’s origins misses about today’s world.