Thomas Powers

A Real Live Socialist

What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

The Return of Trump—V

On tantrums, dominion, the Southern Strategy, fearmongering ads, New York’s haves and have-nots, and Candidate Fain. 

Trump’s Oath of Denial

He tried to overthrow an election once—why not expect him to do so again?

Facts That Won’t Go Away

“It was narrative I liked and wanted to write, especially of events that people hoped to disguise, conceal, or deny entirely.”

Getting Sacagawea Right

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed—fifty-seven years longer.

Ex-President Trump, Security Threat?

The Fog of Ambition

‘Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century’ by George Packer

The War Without End

The Nuclear Worrier

Daniel Ellsberg’s ‘The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner’

Down the Path of Obsession

The first navigation of the Amazon River by a European in 1541 may properly be described as an accident. One later chronicle of the journey, in the early twentieth century, has been made into a film based on a book: The Lost City of Z.

The Big Thing on His Mind

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Lise Meitner Explained Fission

The Private Heisenberg

His letters potentially cast the history of the German bomb in a very different light.

Girls and Indians

Garrett Price (1895-1979) is best known for the hundreds of cartoons and a hundred covers he drew for The New Yorker, but his long-forgotten strip White Boy, a Sunday comic built around girls and Indians, has now been republished in its entirety.

The Charms of George Armstrong Custer

A Tale of Woe and Glory

‘The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky’

The American Hero

Texas: The Southern Baptists in Power