Corby Kummer

For once, Donald Trump has a point.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Trump had dinner with the artist and aspiring presidential candidate Kanye West. Among West’s entourage was a 24-year-old livestreamer named Nick Fuentes. Fuentes, as all the world now knows, traffics in Holocaust denial, among other provocations. West is an outspoken anti-Semite in his own right.

Some former Trump supporters have raised their voices against the meeting—This time, he’s gone too far! A few even criticized Trump by name.

Now, here’s Trump’s point, implicitly at least: Have these critics been in a coma since 2015? He’s been keeping company with extremists, bigots, and charlatans for a long time—since before he entered politics, in fact.

The cover of a nonfiction book is like the hood of an automobile: Nudge it open, and you’ll find sentences like cylinders and pistons folded and coiled together, an engine ready to propel us toward answers to daunting questions. How did life begin? What is art for? What transpires inside our cells? How do our nation’s values hold up in an era of accelerating change? The best nonfiction does more than just assemble information. It takes a reader through curious landscapes, offering a deeper grasp of how the world moves and, most important, what moves it.

The seven nonfiction titles below are not textbooks; they’re accessible to lay readers, give an overview of crucial topics, and can serve as a jumping-off point for further research. They investigate what our society values and what it’s built on, driving us to the monumental, the sublime, the quintessentially human.

When the ominous warnings started hitting my inbox a few months ago, I tried to ignore them. The emails contained none of the humor or playfulness of the early Gmail ethos. Instead, they were terse and vaguely threatening, seeming to channel the depressing spirit of financial collapse and austerity present everywhere around us. The subject line: “Your Gmail is almost out of storage.” The body, in essence: This is a shakedown—pay us a subscription fee in perpetuity, and we will continue granting you what we once promised would be free access to your own life and memories.

The message wouldn’t have triggered such resistance had I not been receiving it from every other quarter of my digital life simultaneously—if Apple hadn’t already ransacked my pockets for subscription fees to maintain my ever-expanding photo archive, and to insure and finance “care” for my ever more expensive assortment of its products; if Microsoft hadn’t insisted that I subscribe to its word-processing software; if so many talented, enterprising friends and acquaintances didn’t now depend on Substack and Patreon donations; if I didn’t have to rent my music library from Spotify instead of owning my own records; if I didn’t have to fork over Prime fees to Amazon for my packages and to watch professional tennis; if I hadn’t been obliged to maintain Netflix, Canal+, and AppleTV accounts so that my children would sit quietly on airplanes; if Elon Musk hadn’t promised to render my tweets invisible if I didn’t pay him in monthly $8 installments. By the time those damn Gmail requests became unignorable, I had long since reached the point of peak micropayments. I was drowning in subscriptions.

In a 2005 episode of The Office, Michael Scott, the office manager, requires his employees to choose an upside-down index card from a tray and place it on their forehead. The cards bear a racial or ethnic label—Black, Jewish, Italian, and so on—and Michael tells the employees to treat one another according to the label listed on the card and to “stir the melting pot” by playing to racial stereotypes. The scene, which ends with Michael getting slapped in the face, mocks corporate America’s ham-handed approach to diversity training. Back in 2005, almost no one saw the C-suite or the human-resources office as an engine of progressive change. Indeed, the idea that workers would look to their employers for leadership on any delicate social or political matters seemed risible.

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My brother arrived in my life like the rain always did: after fervent prayer and petitioning. My father was a crop duster in the Texas Panhandle, a land where memories of the Dust Bowl remained painfully fresh even as the farmers remained stubbornly persistent. And so we were always praying for rain, before Friday-night high-school football games, around the dinner table, at church on Sunday morning. When rain canceled the rodeo or a much-anticipated carnival, gratitude held our disappointment in check. When hail flattened crops and tornadoes ripped sheet-metal roofs off barns, we took the bitter with the sweet: At least we got some rain.

Something dramatic happened in China over the weekend: The people fought back.

Citizens frustrated by years of oppressive COVID-prevention controls erupted in protest across China. In the western metropolis of Chengdu; Guangzhou, in the country’s south; and Nanjing, in the east, protesters called for an end to the lockdowns that have paralyzed lives and livelihoods. In the capital, Beijing, they yelled, “We want freedom!” In Shanghai, protesters called for the resignation of China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

The outburst of discontent, rare in recent years, presents the biggest challenge to Xi’s power since his reign began a decade ago. The government touted Xi’s zero-COVID policy as a triumph of his stewardship and a mark of the superiority of China’s authoritarian system. Now the policy is breaking down under the weight of the excesses and abuses that autocracy breeds. Zero COVID, designed to protect public health, is morphing into a contest between a repressive state and a complex society, arguably of a magnitude unseen in China since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

You can now know everything about your baby at all times. An expectant parent of a certain type—cash-flush and availed of benzodiazepine, or maybe just fretful—will be dizzied by the options.

Consider the $300 “dream sock,” for sale again after a hiccup with the FDA, which latches on to your infant and beams numbers to your smartphone—numbers such as “110 beats per minute” observed from baby’s little heart, and “97% average O2” for the air inhaled by baby’s little lungs and distributed to baby’s little bloodstream. You might rent the Snoo, a popular bassinet that shimmies when your baby makes a peep, with various intensities depending on the nature of that peep. It transmits further health-tracking numbers to your mobile device; Snoo was rocking my child with Level 3 vibrations for 25 minutes last night, you will think to yourself, and seriously too. Many parents will use an app to parse the color of poop (you can generally rest easy, even when it’s green) and a smart thermometer that remains affixed below the armpit for up to 24 hours.

The conservative justices have a selective and destructive notion of “liberty.” In overruling Roe v. Wade last term, the Supreme Court found that the “liberty” explicitly protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process clause does not include freedom against forced childbearing. In contrast, in cases that concern the Constitution’s structural provisions creating and empowering the institutions of the federal government—provisions that do not mention liberty—the Court has wrapped itself in liberty to explain why it has acted to protect the liberty of a powerful few. Yet the liberty of the vulnerable many, which grows rather than recedes with the kinds of federal protections the Court has rejected, goes unremarked.

Five decades after his death, J. Edgar Hoover still haunts the FBI. His nearly 48-year reign as its director, from 1924 to 1972, has come to symbolize the dangers of a stealth domestic police-and-intelligence agency in an open society. Hoover is widely seen today as an autocrat who used secret surveillance and other illegal means to control politicians and infiltrate and disrupt domestic political groups in the service of his conservative worldview. No operation confirms this verdict more vividly than the FBI’s wide-ranging electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in a threatening letter to King accompanied by tape recordings of romantic trysts—an effort designed to drive King from the civil-rights movement or induce him to commit suicide.

The Kingdom, Lars von Trier’s 1990s miniseries about the supernatural goings-on in a Copenhagen hospital, isn’t your average medical drama. The focus isn’t on mass emergencies, rushed consultations, or code blues. Instead, the first episode features a tedious argument about who has administrative clearance to order CT scans. Also: A medical student steals a cadaver’s head, an occultist masquerading as a patient goes ghost-hunting, and two seemingly clairvoyant dishwashers offer cryptic commentary. The Kingdom is less ER than it is Scrubs by way of Twin Peaks—a hospital farce with paranormal tendencies.

By the end of the pilot, however, it’s obvious that von Trier is making more than a spooky workplace comedy. The most haunting scene is one not in which we glimpse ghosts, but in which we learn that the hospital’s celebrated neurosurgeon botched an operation that left a young girl with catastrophic brain damage. Many such acts of malpractice and medical machismo dominate the original eight episodes. Some events are played for laughs—for instance, the chaos that ensues when one doctor tries to turn another into a zombie—but the critique is clear. Even as the show focuses on unearthly forces, it insists that the true enemies are closer at hand, walking the corridors in white coats, and occasionally gathering for frat-like “lodge” rituals. In The Kingdom, cronyism, bureaucratic inertia, and medical hubris do more harm than any ghoul.