#unconventional-biography

#unconventional-biography

In 2025, Dmae Lo Roberts embarked on a statewide storytelling experience focusing on personal stories from both artists and community members. These stories are a form of living oral history.

"Cinematic Immunity" offers a workers'-eye view of Hollywood on the Hudson, revealing the intricate dynamics of filmmaking in New York City from 1954 to 9/11.

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

While Howard's case is full of nuance, Ogilvie initially only sees him as an overweight patient who might be better served by the medical facilities at the zoo. It's a breathtakingly callous statement, especially when made within earshot of the patient, yet to many larger-bodied people, it's a very real concern.

New biographies and freshly issued retrospectives reexamine the lives and legacies of fashion's biggest names, from archetypical It girl Jane Birkin to the eternally ahead of his time Issey Miyake.

Tracy Kidder's gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.

They meet whatever half-formed idea they already associate with the category, and that idea ends up doing a lot more work than the product itself. Someone hears "AI tool for business" and immediately imagines Hollywood robots or their boss replacing half the team. Someone hears "blockchain platform," and their mind jumps to a chart going straight down. A buyer sees a proptech product and wonders whether it'll complicate an already stressful process.

Filmmaker Simplice Ganou, from Burkina Faso, spends his time documenting people and relationships, but when he travels to Winterthur, Switzerland, he faces a new challenge: nobody wants to talk to him.

"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.

When the people who are after me get here, they'll arrest me and put me on trial, or they'll disappear me to some black site. Or they won't bother with any of that and they'll just kill me. All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel's prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success: I am a fucking genius, a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

Every season, the Next Big Idea Club editorial team reviews dozens of upcoming books to curate a selection of the most exciting, must-read nonfiction titles. We start with a broad pool of nominees from which we identify a small handful of finalists and, ultimately, an official season selection. Today, it's our pleasure to share our list of five finalists for Season 29! Without further ado, the new books we're most excited about right now are . . .