Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly ...

The world of Smithsonian scholars is vast and limitless—from the oceans to outer space, from the prehistoric past to the dawn of the digital age. This year, they worked to bring the public such ...

From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year Joe Spring, ...

This article first appeared in Book Gossip, a newsletter about what we’re reading and what we actually think about it. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month. Dear Book Gossipers, you don’t ...

Spring has sprung, and along with it, one of the most exciting periods in the publishing calendar. As we all count down the days to Memorial Day and the official kick-off of summer at the end of the ...

In this prodigiously researched epic, Torigian details the life of Xi Zhongxun—the father of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping—to explain the history of the Chinese Communist Party. Along the way, ...

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on the curation of a book collection. By Kwame Anthony Appiah I have a Little Free Library in my front yard. I encourage my neighbors to take books and leave books, ...

After another amazing year for horror fiction in 2024, it’s time to look ahead, and if the past year gave us a bounty, then the next is delivering a full-on glut. We’ve got new books from the masters ...

With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by ...