When Samuel Huntington died late last year, obituary notices and memorial appreciations noted that the former Harvard political scientist was among the most influential thinkers of the late twentieth century. Huntington served as a mentor to a generation of scholars—but unlike them, he also served as an adviser to Washington policymakers. And his most enduring legacy will be the argument known informally as the Huntington thesis: the idea that global conflict stems from the competing cultural identities of seven or eight “civilizations.” This idea gained cachet after the September 11 attacks

What was so great about I. F. Stone? For many journalists—most but not all of them on the left—“Izzy” remains the ultimate scribbler of truth to power. Like-minded bloggers claim him as a patron saint; last year, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard began awarding an annual I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. D. D. Guttenplan concludes his new biography, American Radical, “I. F. Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world.”

The future icon achieved his biggest scoop in 1964. Stone debunked the shaky tale the

“I was bereft of human contact and exchange. What was going on in the outside world? No echoes reached me. I was suspended in limbo, unknowing, unreached.” Ruth First’s powerful, spare account of her four-month solitary confinement in 1963 under South Africa’s ninety-day detention law is a personal memoir, but it also serves as a group portrait of a movement. Folded into the meticulous details of her internment—interrogations; the sounds, smells, and routines of prison life; impressions of the guards; the effects of deprivation and psychological torture on her active mind—are the stories of

When Helen Gurley Brown was a junior high student in Little Rock, Arkansas, her teacher asked the class a seemingly innocuous question: Who was the most important person to them in the world? After garnering a host of conventional responses (Mom! Dad! God! FDR!), the teacher declared, to the contrary, “The most important person to any of you is yourself.” This proved a decisive moment for the future magazine editor, who proclaimed in a 1968 Time interview, “I’m a materialist and it’s a materialistic world. Nobody is keeping a woman from doing everything she wants to do but herself.”

Because

In 2006, Kehinde Wiley painted Le Roi à la Chasse, in which a T-shirted young black man imitates the pose assumed by Charles I in Anthony van Dyck’s 1635 canvas of the same name. Though Wiley’s model introduces a casualness into the king’s formal comportment by tossing back his head as if to saunter forward, it is the version of van Dyck’s pastoral portrait in Black Light—Wiley’s first foray into photography—that provides a strikingly contemporary interpretation. Here, the model gazes unswervingly out from the picture, catching us with his look and, through photography’s immediacy, holding us

For years, Ruth Reichl took pleasure in relating what she called “Mim tales,” playful stories of her mother’s fumbles with and trespasses against proper motherhood— as when the dishes she prepared for her son’s engagement party gave guests food poisoning, or when she cobbled together a last-minute snack for her daughter’s Brownie troop by stirring assorted cupboard contents into moldy chocolate pudding salvaged from the fridge.

Early in her slim, potent new memoir, Not Becoming My Mother, Reichl (editor in chief of Gourmet and author of three best-selling memoirs) describes her late mother,