From its beginnings in "Twilight" fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million...

The numbers are staggering: One-third of America's adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before h...

For sale in CIS only! Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured...

<p>Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidl...

In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution".The Only Woman in the Room" chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitu...

In sheer numbers, no form of government control comes close to the police stop. Each year, twelve percent of drivers in the United States are stopped by the police, and the figure is almost double among racial minorities. Police stops are among the m...

The term "community organizer" was deployed repeatedly against Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as a way to paint him as an inexperienced politician unfit for the presidency. The implication was that the job of a community organizer...

Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillanc...

Feet, bras, autopsies, hair – Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in "You Feel So Mortal", a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came...

After observing the varying reactions to the 1998 death of James Byrd, Jr. in Texas, called a lynching by some, denied by others, Ashraf Rushdy determined in order to understand this event he needed to understand the long history of lynching in the U...