Read Beat (...and repeat)

Where are you with maps? Still digging in the glove compartment for that dog-eared map of Iowa? Gazing contentedly at a map of the world with Greenland as the dominant feature? Maybe you’ve got a pocket map of attractions in Downtown Chicago? Wherever you are when it comes to maps, you need to know what Yale history professor Bill Rankin is preaching: all maps lie. Maybe he wouldn’t actually say t...

When Kristin Hoganson came from the East to the Midwest 25 years ago to teach at the University of Illinois, she realized she had entered the heartland, that safe sanctuary that lies between the American coasts. But was it? Her book, The Heartland: An American History , delves into heartland characteristics that have portrayed the rural communities of the Midwest as local, insular, isolationist –...

If you’re weary of being bombarded by claims and concerns over AI, you need to hear David Eliot talk about the subject. The author of Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI is “the story of how artificial intelligence was born from human longing, grief, and ambition. It’s the story of the humans at the forefront of this field, from Hinton to Lovelace, Turing to Altman,” he said. As a...

When you review the life of Jessica Mitford, the activist muckraking journalist who died in 1996, you’re following someone who not only lived through world events but put her body on the line and wrote about them. That list includes the Spanish Civil War (she went to Spain as a 17-year-old adamantly opposed to fascism), World War II, the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the fight for civil rights in...

Science fiction has long contemplated the possibility that machines could rise up against their human creators. Movies such as 2001, Terminator , Matrix , and I, Robot are part of our cultural history. But James Barrat, author of The Intelligence Explosion , suggests that it’s not out of line to worry about just where technology is leading us--for real.  Barrat, a documentary filmmaker, has been o...

The 15th in the Gray Man series is out this February. That means it’s time to talk with author Mark Greaney about the latest Court Gentry entry. Entitled The Hard Line, action takes place in Bulgaria, Nicaragua, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to list just a few of the action-packed locations involved. If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s a spy thriller. We’re talking espionage and internati...

You get a sense of The Killing Age by Clifton Crais, a history professor at Emory University, when you read “killing became the West’s most profound contribution to world history" in the author's preface. “The violence that created our present world of global warming is too often forgotten in the now vast literature on the Anthropocene, including and especially the violence that was the...

When you think about the early days of motion pictures, you might recall the New York/New Jersey area where Thomas Edison set up shop in 1893. Maybe you reflect on those very early days when producers in search of sunshine ventured to shooting locations in Florida and pre-Hollywood California.  But you probably don’t think of Texas. Yet that’s where Gaston Melies went to make movies in 1910 at the...

There’s probably no brighter star in the Hollywood heavens than Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell who died at the age of 35 in 1962 has been the focus of hundreds of accounts, linking her with the leading celebrities of the day—John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller, to name a few.  While linked to numerous conspiracy theories that resound more than 60 years after her d...

Rural America faces serious problems. That record has been playing for decades: the lack of jobs, healthcare, housing, and internet access are just some of the low notes. Who hasn’t driven through a small town to observe empty buildings that once housed banks, hotels, or theaters and wondered about the place’s future? Former farm towns that once bustled on Saturday nights, and distinct villages th...

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times , Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.” The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a...

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world. Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy , challen...

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest . Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds.  After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest...

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet , is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet. We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical p...

“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.” That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI. The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, wor...

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki. Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark . Fitts diss...

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts. Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October , his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984.  But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and n...

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable. Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy prom...

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country. Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California.  “Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five mi...

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s? Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time. But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies , says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around H...

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money . It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money. Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "t...

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary . When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker , the public learned what it was like to be incinerated...

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician ), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest...

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda. The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal th...

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system. It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyon...