Why is it so hard to amend the Constitution? Jill Lepore’s lucid, accessible We the People sets out to explain why the light of popular constitutional change has dimmed. ... Read full Story
Not My Type is a fascinating courtroom drama, and E. Jean Carroll’s irrepressible voice lends a sense of fun to her moving and serious story. ... Read full Story
With spot-on hilarity and plenty of heart, Maddie Frost expertly captures the joys and aggravations of adjusting to older siblinghood. ... Read full Story
Mamiko Shiotani’s The Grumpy Ghost Upstairs is an instant storytime classic and carries within it a wonderful lesson: sometimes it's okay to try new things. ... Read full Story
Zoey Abbott’s heartwarming This Year, a Witch! is an empathetic ode to self-expression infused with vibrant neon colors and finely tuned humor. ... Read full Story
In this delicately crafted yet undeniably political slice-of-life novel, Angela Flournoy has put her finger on the cultural pulse of the past two decades. ... Read full Story
Boy From the North Country is a stunning piece of autofiction following a novelist who is summoned home to care for his mother in a health crisis and learns that he may be Bob Dylan’s son. ... Read full Story
Alive is an exciting encyclopedia of weird scientific projects that explore what it means to be alive, and it’s perfect for anyone curious about what it will mean to be a human in the future. ... Read full Story
A woman’s hand bursts out of a newly dug grave in the beginning of The Burial Tide by Neil Sharpson—and things only get more chilling from there. ... Read full Story
Hyewon Yum reflects on a special Korean seaweed soup that celebrates motherhood and served as the inspiration for her picture book, A Spoonful of the Sea. ... Read full Story
In Wild For Austen, Devoney Looser explodes the myth of the frill-capped spinster author and reveals a rebellious and wonderfully wicked Jane. ... Read full Story
“Conspiracy theorists (and those of us who argue with them have the scars to show for it) often maintain that the ones debunking the conspiracies are allied with the conspirators.” — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2025
Did you know?
To debunk something is to take the bunk out of it—that bunk being nonsense. (Bunk is short for the synonymous bunkum, which has political origins.) Debunk has been in use since at least the 1920s, and it contrasts with synonyms like disprove and rebut by suggesting that something is not merely untrue but is also a sham—a trick meant to deceive. One can simply disprove a myth, but if it is debunked, the implication is that the myth was a grossly exaggerated or foolish claim.