If you’re wondering why the incidence of cancer seems to rise continuously despite all the advances in cancer research and treatment, look no further than the aging of the American population. Cancer, primarily a disease that comes with aging, becomes well nigh inevitable once we get really old. …

Sixteen eighty-eight is familiar to many English-speakers as the year of Britain’s Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange invaded England and restored the primacy of the Protestant religion in the nation’s affairs. But University of Southern California historian John E. Wills Jr. chose the year 1688 to illustrate the grand…

Everybody in the world of technology talks about the Metaverse. But no two people among them seem to agree on what it is, how it will be built, who if anyone will control it, and when it will become a reality. Tech investor Matthew Ball sets out to address this…

Most general American history texts give short shrift to the rise of organized labor. And when they do so, they tend to cite little more than a handful of large-scale clashes between labor and management in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Familiar examples include the Haymarket affair (1886)…

World War II continues to loom large in popular media today three-quarters of a century after the conflict ended. Films, books, television, and an abundance of material online help bring the most destructive war in human history into sharp relief. But much of what we see and read fails…

What? Another book about Donald Trump? I’ve already reviewed nearly two dozen of them. So, what could possibly move me to read another one? Well, three things, as it turns out. First, author Mark Leibovich is one of the funniest observers of American politics I’ve come across in recent years…

Amazon lists 4,000 books about the Holocaust. Half are nonfiction, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. The rest include such bestselling novels as The Book Thief and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Of course, some of the innumerable memoirs and novels relate the…

History can deceive us. When we read about the major events of the past, they appear inevitable with all the black-and-white certainty of words on a page. And that’s certainly true about D-Day. The Allies had assembled such overwhelming force in June 1944 that it may seem they couldn’t possibly…

Sometime late in the 1980s, I was speaking with the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. The conversation turned to the stock market and how poor a guide it was to the country’s economic health. He pointed to General Electric and its CEO, Jack Welch. The company had consistently…