An ageing Justice League returns to stop a new generation of reckless heroes; Alex Ross's paintings.
Superman has a year to live and does twelve impossible things; Morrison and Quitely.
The Joker's possible origin and Barbara Gordon shot; one bad day.
Bruce Wayne's first year and Jim Gordon's; Miller and Mazzucchelli's crime comic.
A 55-year-old Batman comes out of retirement to fight Superman; Frank Miller's 1986 reinvention.
Retired vigilantes in a 1985 with Nixon still president; the graphic novel that made comics grow up.
A shipwreck in 1741, mutiny and two rival accounts reaching England; Grann's survival story.
Percy Fawcett vanishes in the Amazon in 1925 and Grann goes to look.
The Osage murders of the 1920s and the birth of the FBI; Grann before Scorsese.
The Sackler family and OxyContin; Keefe's dynasty of the opioid crisis.
A mother of ten disappeared in Belfast in 1972 and what the Troubles did; Patrick Radden Keefe.
Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.
Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.
John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.
James Baldwin's two essays of 1963 on race and religion in America.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about being Black in America; a letter in the tradition of Baldwin.
Isabel Wilkerson follows three people in the Great Migration of six million Black Americans north.
Hochschild on the Congo Free State and the ten million who died for rubber.
Dee Brown's history of the American West from the Native side, 1860 to 1890.
Jane Jacobs against the planners; eyes on the street and short blocks.
Alexander's 253 patterns for towns, buildings and rooms; the book software engineers stole from.
Don Norman on doors that need instructions and why the user is not wrong.
Knuth's volumes since 1968; the book programmers own and do not finish.
Jason Schreier on how ten games got made, from Stardew Valley to The Witcher 3.
Carmack and Romero build id Software and Doom; the video-game industry's origin story.
Steven Levy on the MIT hackers, the homebrew club and the game makers who built the culture.
Tracy Kidder inside Data General building a computer in 1979; the first great tech book.
Isaacson from Ada Lovelace to the web; the collaborative history of the computer.
James Gleick on the butterfly effect and the scientists who found order in disorder.
Simon Singh on the 358-year problem and Andrew Wiles's seven secret years solving it.
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