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As I grew older, I began wondering about the version of my mother that existed before I did. Not just the parent who raised me, but the younger person she once was: the life she’d imagined for herself, the experiences that shaped her, the parts of her history that I will never fully know.

Please don’t judge me, but in March 2020, when I moved across the country, I got rid of six boxes of books, including many classic works of literature and nonfiction. Gone were titles by Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey—I’d rather reread Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities—plain old disinterest). Moby-Dick went (I’d tried for years, and failed). So did Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (just never got around to them).

While the high-security corridors of Washington and Berlin are occupied with a frantic, transactional debate over NATO burden sharing and the fallout of the Iran blockade, a far more profound rupture is occurring in the quiet streets of the Rhineland-Palatinate.
President Trump announced last week that the United States will remove 5,000 troops from Germany, possibly as the beginning of a larger drawdown.

A student emailed me yesterday, panicked, in the early afternoon. She was worried about her final project in my university course, which was due at midnight. By the time I saw the email, three hours had elapsed. By the time we got on Zoom to discuss the matter, another 90 minutes.
That’s when I learned about the outage. Canvas, an online service used by as many as 40 percent of North American colleges, among them Washington University in St.

For more than four decades, the Ninth Congressional District of Tennessee stood as a bulwark, ensuring that the Black voters who compose a majority of the city of Memphis could choose their representative in Washington. With a nod from the Supreme Court, the state’s ruling Republicans took barely a week to wipe that district off the map.

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I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.
This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.

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“There has been a threat to publicly release government material long shrouded in secrecy.” This sentence could have been intoned by a TV newscaster anytime in the past few years, about any number of real or alleged cover-ups—of Joe Biden’s mental decline, or the names in the Epstein files, or the origins of COVID‑19.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The Pulitzer Prizes, whose 2026 honorees were announced this week, reward excellent American journalism, music, drama, and books. Public conversation about the six categories of book awards tends to focus on the fiction prize, especially in years when the winner is unusually commercial, such as 2018’s Less, or obscure, like this year’s Angel Down, or not chosen at all, as in 2012.