![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/shattered-lands-198x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhen the Simon Commission met Jinnah in the lobby of the Western Hotel in February 1929, everything about him belied the fact that he would soon found the world\u2019s first Islamic republic: Pakistan. A reserved Gujarati barrister-turned politician who the New York Times <\/i>described as “undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire,” he drank whisky, ate pork and was renowned for chain-smoking cigarettes in his open-top limousine.<\/p>\n
The question of how this man evolved into the founder of Pakistan is one that has puzzled historians for close to a century, and that the Simon Commissioners themselves would reflect upon repeatedly in the years to come. Growing up in Hindu-majority Karachi, Jinnah had originally wanted to be a Shakespearean actor, but he proved unsuccessful and instead enrolled in a law degree, resolving never to fail at anything ever again. By the end of the Great War, he had become one of the best paid lawyers in the country, an elected member of the Viceroy\u2019s Imperial Legislative Council; the tallest leader in Muslim politics, and well on his way to becoming the most important Congress leader. With his meticulous attention to detail, Jinnah could navigate himself precisely where he needed to be, a trait that often made him seem aloof. But those who knew him well found him to be warm and exceptionally intelligent. “Never was there a nature whose outer qualities provided so complete an antithesis of its inner worth,” wrote Sarojini Naidu, the society hostess and nationalist poet who was a close friend of Jinnah. Jinnah, she believed, should be lauded as India\u2019s primary “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity,” even if his cold reserve meant you did “need a fur coat now and then.” She writes,<\/p>\n
His accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a na\u00efve and eager humanity, an intuition as quick and tender as a woman\u2019s, a humour gay and winning as a child\u2019s. Pre-eminently rational and practical…his worldly wisdom effectively disguise[s] a shy and splendid idealism which is the very essence of the man.<\/p>\n
Jinnah\u2019s rise had seemed unstoppable, but in 1918 he had scandalized Bombay high society by courting Ruttie Petit, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Parsi baronet and one of the most “envied debutante[s] of her generation.” The patriarch of the family, Sir Dinshaw Petit, happened to be a vocal supporter of interfaith marriages, believing like many liberals at the time that they would be vital in gluing India into a single nation. When forty-two-year-old Jinnah had asked to marry his teenage daughter, however, Sir Dinshaw was horrified and banned the two from meeting. Jinnah and Ruttie continued their courtship, however, and Ruttie writes that Jinnah burned “storming passions into the very fibre of her being.” In his presence she appeared utterly radiant: “like a fairy,” wrote one observer, and two months after her birthday they eloped, with Ruttie converting to Islam the day before the wedding. “Jinnah has at last plucked the blue flower of his desire,” wrote Sarojini Naidu, who was closely following the scandal along with the rest of Bombay society.<\/p>\n
It was all very sudden and caused terrible agitation and anger among the Parsis: but I think though the child has made far greater sacrifices than she yet realises, Jinnah is worth it all\u2014he loves her: the one really genuine emotion of his reserved and self-centred nature and he will make her happy.<\/p>\n
Sarojini\u2019s optimism proved misplaced, however. Parsi society ostracized Ruttie, and her father summoned the couple to court, alleging that Jinnah had abducted her. Here Ruttie defiantly stood up and told the judge, “Mr Jinnah has not abducted me; in fact I have abducted him.” But in the aftermath she was excommunicated from her community, banned from all Parsi social occasions and told she could never return to her childhood home. Having once dreamed a modern India would be able to move past divisions of religion and caste, Jinnah became disillusioned. For Ruttie, meanwhile, it marked the start of a lonely new life. Her husband revealed himself to be a workaholic with an “aversion to holidays” and a tendency to forget her birthday. He spent most of his time campaigning for India\u2019s nationalist movement, and Ruttie ended up alone for months at a time. Jinnah did love her of course, but as his legal assistant recalled years later:<\/p>\n
They were poles apart…I remember her walking into Jinnah\u2019s chambers whilst we were in the midst of a conference, dressed in a manner which would be called fast even by modern standards, perch herself upon Jinnah\u2019s table, dangling her feet, and waiting for Jinnah to finish the conference…[Meanwhile] Jinnah carried on with his work as if she were not there at all.<\/p>\n
The rise of Mohandas Gandhi, who began to overshadow Jinnah as India\u2019s leading nationalist politician, only added further difficulties to the Jinnah\u2019s tumultuous marriage. Jinnah was horrified by the way Gandhi brought religion into politics and felt that under Gandhi\u2019s leadership the Congress Party was being transformed into “an instrument for the revival of Hinduism and for the establishment of Hindu Raj [rule].” He considered Gandhi a diaspora upstart from South Africa who had merely returned to India to cosplay as a sadhu and lecture everyone about how to “fix” Indian culture. But Gandhi\u2019s religious politics proved far more popular than Jinnah\u2019s own, and in December 1920 Jinnah was booed off stage for refusing to address Gandhi as the “Mahatma” or “Great Soul.”<\/p>\n
In turn, Jinnah became increasingly convinced that Gandhi was a “fake and a demagogue,” and when Gandhi proposed a political boycott of British government institutions, he protested that such a move would only end up closing government schools and courts. He tried to rally nationalist leaders against Gandhi, but after months of despair, he finally announced that he was leaving the Congress altogether. “I will have nothing to do with this pseudo religious approach to politics,” Jinnah wearily announced. Outside of Congress, however, Jinnah\u2019s political career began to decline and his relationship with Ruttie deteriorated. Depressed and alone, Ruttie sought solace in Bombay\u2019s jazz clubs while Jinnah focused on building a political base in the Muslim League\u2014a rival political party to the Congress. But his growing emphasis on his Muslim identity only alienated Ruttie more, and one day, when she drove to meet him at the town hall, he screamed at her for packing ham sandwiches. “What have you done!” he exclaimed. “If my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost of a chance of being elected?” Ruttie distanced herself from her husband after that, and instead started experimenting with drugs and spirit communication, leading friends to worry about the number of morphine needles she left scattered around her room.<\/p>\n
With their marriage falling apart, both Jinah and Ruttie neglected their newborn daughter, who would remain nameless for almost six years. The “little baby is one of the most pathetic, heartbreaking things I have ever seen,” wrote Sarojini\u2019s daughter Padmaja Naidu to her sister in 1921. \u2018”I simply cannot understand Ruttie\u2019s attitude\u2014I do not blame her as most people her seem to do, but whenever I remember the dazed, scared child, like some mortally hurt animal, I come near to hating Ruttie in spite of my great affection for her.” Three years later Padmaja\u2019s sister also met the child, and described her as “the one dark shadow (an exquisite little shadow)…[an] unnamed and unloved little baby, [who] clung to me and begged me ‘not to go’ when I was leaving her nursery.” Jinnah, meanwhile, poured his energy into the question of Muslim representation in a future Indian parliament. Although Muslims made up a third of India\u2019s population, they were thinly spread across the country and in any new democratic system would almost always find themselves at the whims of the Hindu majority. Months before the Simon Commission\u2019s arrival, Jinnah put forward a “bold set of proposals” for Muslim representation, which he hoped might resolve the matter. Sarojini Naidu, who had recently been elected the first woman Congress president, bought him a gold casket to mark the occasion, engraved with the inscription:<\/p>\n
To Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Ambassador of Unity. From his loyal friend and follower, Bombay, May 1927, Sarojini Naidu.<\/p>\n
It was around this time that Jinnah learned that no Indians would be included on the Simon Commission. He was quickly recognized as a leader of the anti-Simon Commission boycott, and wrote to a Labour politician: “The exclusion of Indians from the Commission is fundamentally wrong…[and] is calculated to humiliate and wound the self-respect of the people of India.” His career was taking off again, but on January 4, 1928, three weeks before the commission\u2019s arrival, Ruttie announced she was leaving him. Afterwards they sat for hours in a train carriage, before parting ways at Bombay\u2019s Victoria station. Jinnah was “too proud and hurt to stop her.” A month later, when the Simon Commission encountered Jinnah in the lobby of Delhi\u2019s Western Hotel, they found him “immaculately…attired in European dress,” but a shell of his former self. Accompanying him was fellow nationalist Lajpat Rai, who immediately told Cadogan that “he had no inclination for social interaction with any member of the Commission.” Cadogan could see that Jinnah was “struggling to maintain” his role as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, however. Cadogan would never meet Jinnah again, but another of the Simon Commissioners would, under very different circumstances. Twenty years later Clement Attlee would speak to Jinnah as the prime minister of Great Britain, while Jinnah was the founder of Pakistan, the world\u2019s first Islamic republic.<\/p>\n
____________________________<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From<\/em> Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia<\/a> by Sam Dalrymple. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from W.W. Norton & Company. <\/em>Shattered Lands has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the Simon Commission met Jinnah in the lobby of the Western Hotel in February 1929, everything about him belied the fact that he would soon found the world\u2019s first Islamic republic: Pakistan. A reserved Gujarati barrister-turned politician who the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31816,"featured_media":276210,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43102,6,43101,43092],"tags":[111978,60417,6779,111983,8478,8561,111981,111982,42227,12598],"class_list":["post-276169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","tag-2026-cundill-history-prize","tag-cundill-history-prize","tag-india","tag-muhammad-ali-jinnah","tag-pakistan","tag-partition","tag-sam-dalrymple","tag-shattered-lands-five-partitions-and-the-making-of-modern-asia","tag-south-asia","tag-w-w-norton-and-company","story-type-cundill-history-prize"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ql","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/jinnah.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31816"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276102,"date":"2026-09-03T05:08:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276102"},"modified":"2026-08-31T12:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T16:24:08","slug":"searching-for-the-elusive-snow-leopard-deep-in-the-himalayas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/searching-for-the-elusive-snow-leopard-deep-in-the-himalayas\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching For the Elusive Snow Leopard Deep in the Himalayas"},"content":{"rendered":" The Himalaya, India, January 2008<\/em><\/p>\n At minus sixteen degrees Celsius, it was warm for a winter\u2019s day in the Himalaya. I was in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, a huge gorge that cuts deep into the mountains of the Greater Himalaya and Tibet. Wind\u2011lashed, with temperatures dropping as low as minus thirty\u2011five degrees Celsius, this is a high\u2011altitude land of vertical rock faces and torrential glacier\u2011melt rivers.<\/p>\n I had come to study the winter foraging behavior of the blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur<\/i>), a unique species of wild goat with sheeplike traits. Standing some ninety centimeters tall at the shoulder, the blue sheep live in herds that range as high as nineteen thousand feet above sea level. Superb climbers, they have an uncanny ability to \u201cdisappear\u201d into the slopes and cliffs, where their gray coats camouflage them against the rocky backdrop. When startled, they give a burst of three or four loud football\u2011referee\u2011type whistles to alert their herd to danger. The males have thick, ridged horns that curl sideways and back, whereas the females have thin, short, straight horns. Found across the Tibetan Plateau and the Greater Himalaya, these blue sheep are known by many names\u2014bharal <\/i>in Hindi, y\u00e1n y\u00e1ng <\/i>in Mandarin, naur <\/i>in Nepali, na <\/i>or sna <\/i>in Tibetan, and more\u2014and are the snow leopard\u2019s favored prey.<\/p>\n My plan was to spend the winter of 2007 in Spiti, tracking the blue sheep herds as they foraged, meticulously recording their behavior and the plants they chose to eat.<\/p>\n Seeing the snow leopard changed the course of my life, and every new snow leopard sighting reminds me to go in search of the unknown, instills me with a sense of meaning and purpose.<\/p>\n That particular day, I had left camp at six in the morning and by half past seven reached the spot where I had seen blue sheep the day before\u2014but there was no sign of them. I thought they might have gone beyond the next hill, but no such luck. After another two hours of looking for my study herd, I decided to rest a while before resuming the search. Tired and cold, I was now at the edge of a rolling plateau named Hom. On my right was a gorge, a vertiginous thousand\u2011meter drop to the Shilla River, an important tributary of the Spiti. When a golden eagle flew below me in the gorge, I pulled out my camera to photograph this king of the Himalayan birds, but the device refused to start; its battery had been drained by the chill.<\/p>\n An hour of hard climbing through knee\u2011deep snow took me to the crest of the plateau at an altitude of forty\u2011five hundred meters. I gasped for breath in the rarefied air. The endless Tibetan steppe extended in front of me, the dark and frigid gorge to the Shilla River on my right. Resting my weight on my ice axe, I was admiring the panoramic view when the cliffs below me suddenly came alive as a house\u2011sized boulder plunged with a crash into the gorge. By now, I was used to seeing rockfalls but never anything of this scale. A deep silence followed.<\/p>\n A chirpy whistle broke the quiet: the blue sheep\u2019s alarm call. It rang from somewhere very close, but I couldn\u2019t see the animals. Then I spotted them nearby in the gorge\u2014a group of twelve blue sheep grazing on one of the rock ledges only a hundred or so feet diagonally below me. My systematic observation of their behavior and feeding could finally begin. Over an hour passed without much activity from the herd. The sky turned gray, and feathery flakes of powdered snow filled the air.<\/p>\n My body stiffened. The whole canyon was frozen\u2014boulders covered with snow, a few leafless trees, no water flowing in the gorge\u2014and the only sounds were those of the occasional tumble of smaller rocks into the abyss.<\/p>\n A small movement caught the corner of my eye. This was not a falling rock; there was no sound. The movement was on the same slope as my blue sheep and me. I looked carefully where I thought the ripple had come from. It moved again, and this time I saw it: the ghost of the mountains. The snow leopard. He was so well camouflaged that I never would have noticed him had he not taken a step forward. The blue sheep were unaware of the snow leopard; the snow leopard was unaware of the blue sheep. He was on a ledge about four hundred feet below me and his prey. He must have been there the whole time. He seemed young, a little small to be a full\u2011grown adult. He sat down briefly but stayed alert, with his neck stretched, head up, and eyes scanning the horizon. I was trying to pick out any peculiarities in his fur to identify him, but it was impossible to fix upon details at this distance. He got up and started padding along the cliff, moving gently, hardly leaving a footprint in the deepening snow. I had become so familiar with these mountains that I knew exactly where that ledge would lead him. He would pass directly below the blue sheep herd I was watching, then below me, then finally emerge on a wider slope farther to my right.<\/p>\n Now the quest was to reach the starting point of the ledge before the snow leopard did and then hide there to get a better look. I ran at full tilt, struggling in the thin air. The shoulder of the plateau gave me complete cover from the snow leopard beneath. The start of the ledge on which the snow leopard walked was slightly broad and had a little grass on it, so it was no surprise to find a herd of blue sheep grazing there as well. Seeing these blue sheep in the path of the approaching snow leopard, I was certain about two things: The snow leopard had not yet arrived, but when he did, there was going to be a scene.<\/p>\n I took cover between two boulders, using the one in front to prop up my elbows like a tripod\u2014for my binoculars\u2014and the one behind me to support my back. Hours seemed to pass, but there was still no sign of the snow leopard. The weather had turned windy, and with the sun behind the clouds, the deep cold began to freeze the sweat on my clothes. I was considering whether the leopard might have turned and gone when, suddenly, another alarm whistle rang out: The snow leopard had arrived. He must be close\u2014the blue sheep were running\u2014yet I could not see him.<\/p>\n I had to think like a snow leopard: Where would I be if I were him? I scanned the ledge along which I was expecting the snow leopard to appear and eventually sighted him sitting under an overhanging rock, perfectly camouflaged. He was indeed a little young. On many occasions, I had seen two sets of pugmarks\u2014the footprints of a mother and her cub\u2014in this very area. A camera\u2011trap picture had shown the cub to be a male. Could this be him? Had he been weaned from his mother already? And where was she? Dead\u2014or perhaps trying to mate again this winter? I was smiling with the sheer joy of seeing this incredible creature, but my mind was a roller coaster. Would he know how to hunt? Would he be able to make a kill anytime soon?<\/p>\n And then, without warning, the snow leopard got up and gently glided down the steep sides of the gorge, disappearing into the boulders at the bottom.<\/p>\n Only then did I become conscious of my surroundings. An inch of snow had accumulated over the last few hours, a remarkable fall for one day in the Trans\u2011Himalaya. The temperature had dropped further, and only when I tried to move did I realize that my feet had frozen. I had been sitting still for too long. I found an overhanging rock (just like the one the snow leopard had used for shelter), gathered some twigs, and lit a small fire. Taking off my boots, I gasped as warmed blood rushed into my feet, triggering intense pain\u2014my toes thawing.<\/p>\n I sat for a while, my body aching with fatigue but my heart full of happiness. Under that rock, with the small fire to keep me toasty, the snow falling all around me, I was overcome with emotions.<\/p>\n I had seen snow leopards once before, but this was special. For the first time, I had experienced a perfect harmony between the mountains, the snow, the leopard, the blue sheep, and me. I had spotted one of the rarest animals in the world in its natural habitat and accurately predicted its behavior. The tranquility of the experience told me that I was not an outsider anymore. I was one with the landscape, and I felt accepted. It was impossible not to romanticize this encounter as an invitation into the world of the snow leopard. Studying this animal had been a dream of mine, and now I had been initiated. I was alone with the snow leopard and the blue sheep, deep in the Himalaya. In that moment, I understood what it meant to be a snow leopard biologist, and I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Throughout my career, I have continued to seek such moments of oneness with the mountains.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Yet the question about the number of snow leopards is nearly always followed by a question about whether I\u2019ve ever caught sight of this most elusive of animals. Why do we care so much about seeing wild snow leopards, and what fuels our desire to witness them in their natural habitat? Snow leopards have a singular grip on the human imagination. In the early 1970s, George Schaller, a wildlife scientist, became the first\u2011ever person to photograph a snow leopard in the wild. The picture was published with fanfare by National Geographic <\/i>just a few years after the moon landing, and the snow leopard became a symbol of the mysteries that still exist on planet Earth.<\/p>\n In my first encounters with the snow leopard, I mythologized them as part of a faraway world, removed from humans. But I soon came to realize how closely their lives are entwined with our human world.<\/p>\n Then, in 1978, Peter Matthiessen, Schaller\u2019s friend and travel companion, published The Snow Leopard<\/i>. In it, Matthiessen writes of an expedition he undertook with Schaller, shortly after his wife\u2019s death, to see the snow leopard in the Dolpa region of Nepal. Matthiessen never did see the snow leopard, but the creature\u2019s allure\u2014its aesthetic beauty, its idyllic but desolate mountain habitats, its wary, almost mythical behavior\u2014draws us to this day. Shaped to perfection by evolution, snow leopards live solitary lives in the highest reaches of the Himalaya, surrounded only by glaciers, snow, rocks, and icy peaks. They are shy, and their silvery\u2011brown\u2011and\u2011white coats, marked with dark rosettes, work like magic cloaks, offering such good camouflage that they can disappear in plain sight. They have long, furry tails\u2014the longest of any cat in the world\u2014which they wrap around their bodies like mufflers on cold nights. As they maneuver around exposed cliffs, their tails also work like the balancing poles of tightrope walkers. Their thick, wide paws, lined with fur, act like snowshoes, helping them walk on snow like elves. They are silent predators, unable to roar. They move through the cliffs and rock faces like smoke. For me, nearly two decades and several sightings later, every snow leopard encounter is still a transcendent experience, like the crack of dawn after a dark night. Seeing the snow leopard changed the course of my life, and every new snow leopard sighting reminds me to go in search of the unknown, instills me with a sense of meaning and purpose.<\/p>\n Snow leopards are an endangered species, sparsely distributed in mountainous terrain in the twelve countries that straddle the Himalaya and Central Asia. They are legally protected in all these countries, but given their remote mountain habitat and inaccessible high\u2011elevation dwellings, their conservation did not gain urgency until recently. How could anyone prioritize the conservation of a species that we knew so little about? Knowing the animal would come before worrying about its survival. Snow leopards were safe, it was thought, in their rugged and isolated mountain abode; humanity would never breach their Himalayan kingdom.<\/p>\n But climate change now threatens the glaciers and rivers of the Himalaya. Globalization has connected distant places into a complex web of supply chains across the planet, where consumer decisions in distant countries threaten the survival of species they have never seen and, sometimes, have never known existed. Extractive mining has reached the highest mountain peaks and the deepest oceans, and there is no protection in even the most remote corners of the earth.<\/p>\n Yet the story of the snow leopard is one of hope. In my first encounters with the snow leopard, I mythologized them as part of a faraway world, removed from humans. But I soon came to realize how closely their lives are entwined with our human world. As my research progressed, I came to understand that I would be blessed with more glimpses of the snow leopard if I learned more about the things that surround them: the mountains where they live, the herbivores they hunt, and the people who share this landscape with them. During nearly twenty years of research, I have attempted to understand these entanglements as much as the biology of the snow leopard itself. The local people\u2014the real custodians of the mountains and their wildlife\u2014and my time spent with them have made me a firm believer in a bright future for the snow leopard.<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n From <\/em>The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard<\/a> by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi. Published on August 25, 2026 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Himalaya, India, January 2008 At minus sixteen degrees Celsius, it was warm for a winter\u2019s day in the Himalaya. I was in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, a huge gorge that cuts deep into the mountains of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31797,"featured_media":276147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43231,43092],"tags":[1453,5742,15925,67525,6779,111855,39238,16228,6552,71041,111928,20907],"class_list":["post-276102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-nature","category-newsandculture","tag-animals","tag-biology","tag-ecology","tag-himalayas","tag-india","tag-kulbhushansingh-suryawanshi","tag-penguin-publishing-group","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-riverhead-books","tag-snow-leopards","tag-the-ghost-of-the-mountains-unraveling-the-secrets-of-the-snow-leopard","tag-the-natural-world","story-type-the-natural-world"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Pg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/snow-leopard.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31797"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276274,"date":"2026-09-03T05:07:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276274"},"modified":"2026-09-02T21:43:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T01:43:03","slug":"what-measuring-the-carbon-footprint-of-a-rock-concert-reveals-about-corporate-complicity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-measuring-the-carbon-footprint-of-a-rock-concert-reveals-about-corporate-complicity\/","title":{"rendered":"What Measuring the Carbon Footprint of a Rock Concert Reveals About Corporate Complicity"},"content":{"rendered":" Some of music\u2019s most exact measurements have been taken in relation to concerts. Spend any time looking at music from an environmental perspective and you are sure to learn that live music accounts for the majority of the industry\u2019s carbon footprint. You will also quickly learn that most of that footprint comes from audience travel.<\/p>\n According to the latest and most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the subject, gigs generate over 14 million tons of emissions annually in the United States, accounting for 0.2 percent of overall greenhouse gases. In Britain, that number is more like 4 million tons and is good for 1 percent of total yearly emissions. Getting to those gigs accounts for over 60 percent of live music\u2019s footprint in the United States and nearly 80 percent in Britain. Discovering that audience travel is \u201cthe single largest source\u201d of music industry emissions is the report\u2019s \u201ckey insight.\u201d<\/p>\n This insight may be key, but it is not new. Singling out live music and audience travel in accounts of music\u2019s carbon footprint has been industry orthodoxy for at least two decades\u2014certainly since 2007, when both Radiohead and the arts-and-climate nonprofit Julie\u2019s Bicycle published carbon audits of the music world. Radiohead\u2019s efforts were focused on the band\u2019s North American concerts, finding that \u201cfan travel and consumption make up 86 percent of the theater tour and 97 percent of the amphitheater tour.\u201d Julie\u2019s Bicycle, meanwhile, in a sector-wide study that included recording, publishing, and more found that \u201clive music performance together with audience travel account for three-quarters of the UK music industry\u2019s emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n Environmental thinking on live music encourages a form of atmospheric accounting where scrutiny of the personal trees passes for consideration of the political forest.<\/p>\n Musicians are not blameless here. Some touring acts, like Taylor Swift, catch flak for their private jet emissions and try to compensate through carbon offsetting. Others, like Massive Attack, pause or downscale their touring activities while seeking low-carbon options. \u201cArtists should be held accountable for their travel,\u201d according to interviewees in the recent study. And artists apparently agree. \u201cStill,\u201d say the interviewees, \u201ctheir emissions are minutia when compared to that of fans.\u201d It is only logical that if \u201cfan travel is the largest source of GHG emissions in the live music industry,\u201d then \u201cefforts for reducing emissions should be largely directed there.\u201d The report aims to \u201cnullify the distracting, ill-informed mischaracterization of the emissions impact of artists\u201d and make audiences responsible for developing \u201cgood habits\u201d as they attend concerts. Admit one: Homo carbonicus<\/i>.<\/p>\n None of these environmental reports looks exclusively at audiences. They all mention the impact of wider business practices like food and freight. They recognize the tangled and systemic character of the issues they face. But the category of audience travel comes up repeatedly in studies of live music\u2019s carbon footprint\u2014and it is never really questioned. The category is given. The only task is to measure it with greater precision and more impressive methods, so that the largest carbon reductions may be achieved. There will be successes on that front, even as its underlying beliefs about measurement and responsibility lift some eyebrows. But fixating on carbon in this way carries an unintended consequence. It preserves a false dichotomy between artists and audiences.<\/p>\n Performers on stages and attendees in venues are obviously engaged in different kinds of activity. But this surface difference papers over something more fundamentally shared. Most musicians and fans need jobs to make a living. Even very famous musicians are often contracted to sell their capacity to work. Although the carbon footprints of artists and audiences can obviously be measured separately and reckoned accordingly, both groups have to burn carbon in order to participate in social life. And most of them did not choose the economic arrangement that compels them to burn that carbon, that splits labor and leisure in this way, that organizes work and pleasure around certain kinds of mobility.<\/p>\n This setup sometimes authorizes cheap shots about the supposed irony that environmentally conscious musicians and fans would travel for concerts. It can permit low blows about events that promote environmentalism while also making claims on the environment. But does it count as insight to point out that people happen to be part of the reality they want to change? Is there really no festival without cruelty? Either way, environmental thinking on live music encourages a form of atmospheric accounting where scrutiny of the personal trees passes for consideration of the political forest. Focusing on audience travel is one more way that economic power disorganizes and discourages its potential opposition.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Homo carbonicus <\/i>does not actually exist. It cannot be mapped onto any individual\u2019s thoughts or actions or admitted to any concert. Rather, Homo carbonicus <\/i>is a figurative abstraction, a collective consciousness, an interpersonal framework for defining problems and seeking solutions. If the go-to responses of this figure are responsibility and metrology, such instincts find stability in institutions that objectify certain calculative agencies in a wider audit culture. In other words, Homo carbonicus <\/i>is part of a more general historical moment in which people have been transformed \u201cinto \u2018auditable\u2019 entities that focus their energies on doing \u2018what counts\u2019 rather than what is necessarily moral or right.\u201d<\/p>\n These intuitions and institutions can operate differently depending on their scale and size, but they share some patterns of thought. One of the most important limitations here is that in such settings, instead of asking what counts, we assume we already know, and we focus instead on how to account. This explains the focus on audience travel in the carbon footprint of live music. It also helps explain the drive for ever more precise carbon calculators and ever more detailed atmospheric accounting in other industrial and cultural areas of music, while larger questions about carbon go unasked.<\/p>\n Custom carbon calculators are proliferating among independent music businesses and organizations. These range from free personal tools, like Onboard:Earth (a smartphone app that measures and tracks carbon emissions from musician and fan travel to concerts) to Green Your Noise (an online service that will estimate the emissions of everything from single concerts to larger tours and productions). Others follow membership and subscription models, both paid and not. Some hire consulting firms. One of the most visible tools here is the Independent Music Companies Association IMPALA Carbon Calculator, developed in collaboration with the nonprofit climate organization Julie\u2019s Bicycle.<\/p>\n The IMPALA Carbon Calculator is tailored to independent record labels. It is designed to measure business activities deemed to be within IMPALA\u2019s \u201coperational boundary.\u201d Such activities include office use, employee commuting, business travel, manufacturing, and distribution. Since launching in 2022, IMPALA\u2019s calculator has become the tool of choice for 100 labels in twenty-one countries.<\/p>\n Music\u2019s largest companies do things differently. Since around 2020, the three major music groups, Sony, Universal, and Warner, along with large streaming providers like Spotify, have all started reporting their emissions figures annually. An important starting point in the process is making splashy appointments in corporate social responsibility and environmental social governance. Warner, for example, hired Samantha Sims as head of ESG in 2021. Sims worked previously to establish a sustainability program at PVH, which owns clothing brands including Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Spotify hired Elizabeth Nieto in 2021 as leader of equity and impact, an umbrella role that covers initiatives in sustainability, social impact, and \u201cearly career pipeline\u201d as well as \u201cdiversity, inclusion, and belonging.\u201d Nieto\u2019s prior jobs were with corporations like Citigroup, MetLife, and Amazon. Despite differences between the approaches of the independents and the majors, the back-end work of calculating carbon is essentially the same. To inventory their emissions, carbon\u2019s bookkeepers first consult the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard. The GHG Protocol is a process document. It helps businesses decide how and where to draw the lines of responsibility regarding emissions. These are the \u201coperational boundaries\u201dmentioned by IMPALA.<\/p>\n If responsibilization in one sense means accepting forms of self-monitoring and self-deprivation, taking responsibility in carbon accounting can also be an evasive maneuver.<\/p>\n Once those boundaries have been mapped and tallied\u2014counting how many kilometers an organization\u2019s employees have traveled through the air, how much electricity the offices have used, and so on\u2014the second step of carbon accounting involves applying an emissions conversion factor in order to translate those figures into greenhouse gases. If your business is based in Britain, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy will tell you that taking a domestic flight emits 0.24587 kilograms of carbon per passenger, per kilometer, or that staying in a hotel emits 10.4 kilograms of carbon per room, per night. If a company is based primarily in the United States, the conversion factors are likely to be different\u2014and probably provided by the Environmental Protection Agency. A common, worldwide source for power usage is the International Energy Agency\u2019s annual emissions factors reporting.<\/p>\n The GHG Protocol is known to be accurate when it comes to understanding the emissions from an organization\u2019s onsite activities as well as the energy it purchases from the electricity grid. Yet the protocol is open to interpretation when it comes to accounting for emissions along an organization\u2019s wider supply chains and waste streams. Still, it is less important in this context to question accuracy than the boundaries of responsibility.<\/p>\n For example, the GHG Protocol is what allows Spotify to stress that 99 percent of their emissions fall outside of their direct control. It is also what allows IMPALA to say that, although independent labels are answerable for the manufacturing emissions associated with their products (like records), \u201cOur conclusion is that labels are not responsible for digital services\u2019 emissions, in the same way that we are not responsible for the emissions of physical retailers\u2019 stores on the high street.\u201d This is a curious move, where an organization\u2019s wider emissions are both ushered into the accounting picture and bounced out of it. If responsibilization in one sense means accepting forms of self-monitoring and self-deprivation, taking responsibility in carbon accounting can also be an evasive maneuver.<\/p>\n This is not surprising, given the history of the GHG Protocol. Although national carbon accounting and reporting goes back to 1995, with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, and while individual carbon footprints entered climate common sense only after 2004, when the idea was popularized by an ad campaign spearheaded by British Petroleum and the Ogilvy marketing agency, corporate carbon measurements and methods took shape in 1997. It was then that BP, wishing to reduce its emissions profile, found there was no standard system for measuring and reporting on carbon at the corporate level. When BP set out to develop such a standard, its efforts were noticed by Monsanto, General Motors, and the World Resources Institute (currently funded by the Jeff Bezos Earth Fund, the World Economic Forum, Walmart, and many others). The collaboration resulted in a 1998 report titled Safe Climate, Sound Business<\/i>. This report, alongside additional collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (which represents not only BP but also DuPont, Shell, and more), laid the groundwork for the GHG Protocol.<\/p>\n While such efforts seem good if taken at face value, the fact that they are driven by market considerations means there are ulterior purposes at play. For example, when BP and other corporations talk about reducing their emissions, the word reduce <\/i>is doing some heavy lifting. Corporations are often not seeking direct or absolute reduction. They are seeking the appearance of reduction that comes from emissions trading schemes\u2014which are controversial at best, ineffective at worst, and everywhere ensconced in the eco-liberal conviction that capitalist markets, purified of their imperfections and filtered of their failures, are the solutions to their own problems.<\/p>\n Another ulterior purpose of the GHG Protocol and its carbon calculus is that, while it helps corporations appear environmentally virtuous by way of self-scrutiny and self-regulation, the goal is in fact to anticipate (and therefore lessen the impacts of) more strenuous scrutiny and regulations that may be introduced by governments and international organizations. This is straight out of the corporate playbook. Act, or be told how to act. Get out ahead and set the model. Then lobby policymakers to shape laws around the model that the corporations helped set in the first place.<\/p>\n Political scientists have observed that, when it comes to global environmental governance, the GHG Protocol and related initiatives are not only about getting ahead of regulations. Private actors, such as corporations and entrepreneurs, are themselves becoming the regulators\u2014or at least they are exercising such strong influence over the regulatory process that the private actors are effectively in charge. In a way that mirrors (but inverts) responsibilization at the individual level, private firms are assuming \u201cduties normally considered the province of governments.\u201d Music\u2019s largest businesses may not be as active or influential in such processes when compared to a corporation like BP, but music is part of the same story.<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n From<\/em> Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change<\/a> by Kyle Devine. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Verso Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of music\u2019s most exact measurements have been taken in relation to concerts. Spend any time looking at music from an environmental perspective and you are sure to learn that live music accounts for the majority of the industry\u2019s carbon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31835,"featured_media":276283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43108,6,43094,43092],"tags":[43650,46867,18257,632,112044,109145,73275,112043,3147],"class_list":["post-276274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-features","category-music","category-newsandculture","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-crisis","tag-concerts","tag-environmentalism","tag-kyle-devine","tag-live-music","tag-music-industry","tag-recomposed-music-climate-crisis-change","tag-verso-books","story-type-climate-crisis"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19S2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/concert.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31835"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276552,"date":"2026-09-03T04:56:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T08:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276552"},"modified":"2026-09-02T15:39:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T19:39:43","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-33\/","title":{"rendered":"The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction"},"content":{"rendered":" Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers<\/a> for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association.<\/a> Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n 1. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (Liveright) _________________________________________<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-ghost-of-the-mountains-199x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/recomposed-196x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n2.\u00a0Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed)
\n3. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald<\/em><\/a> by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
\n4. Guinness World Records 2027<\/em><\/a> by Guinness World Records
\n5. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W.W. Norton)
\n6. No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism<\/em><\/a> by Jared Huffman (W. W. Norton)
\n7. Is a River Alive?<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton)
\n8. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate\u2014Discoveries from a Secret World<\/em><\/a> by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books)
\n9. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature<\/em><\/a> by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)<\/span>
\n10. This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy<\/em><\/a> by Ben Wikler (W. W. Norton)
\n11. Triage<\/em><\/a> by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)
\n12. A Resistance History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
\n13. The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life<\/em><\/a> by Helen Whybrow (Milkweed Editions)
\n14. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)<\/em><\/a> by Dean Spade\u00a0(Verso)
\n<\/span>15. The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail<\/em><\/a> by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright)
\n16. Man’s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/a> by Viktor E. Frankl (Beacon Press)
\n<\/span>17. S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (Liveright)
\n<\/span>18. The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary<\/em><\/a> by Terry Tempest Williams (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>19. How to Relax<\/em><\/a> (Mindfulness Essentials #5) by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)<\/span>
\n20. How to Relax: Hardcover Gift Edition<\/em><\/a> by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)<\/span>
\n<\/span>21. A Philosophy of Walking<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, John Howe (Transl.)\u00a0(Verso)
\n<\/span>22. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Oregon State University Press)
\n<\/span>23. Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press)
\n<\/span>24. A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps<\/em><\/a> by Jonn Elledge (The Experiment)<\/span>
\n25. These Truths: A History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (W. W. Norton)
\n26. The Wretched of the Earth<\/em><\/a> by Frantz Fanon (Grove)
\n<\/span>27. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)
\n<\/span>28. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground<\/em><\/a> by Zayd Ayers Dohrn (W. W. Norton)
\n29. Tequila Wars: Jos\u00e9 Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico<\/em><\/a> by Ted Genoways (W. W. Norton)
\n30. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change<\/em><\/a> by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books)
\n<\/span>31. How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials #3)<\/em><\/a> by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)<\/span>
\n32. Assata: An Autobiography<\/em><\/a> by Assata Shakur (Lawrence Hill Books)
\n33. Reality TV for Snobs: Everything You Need to Know About the Shows You’re Too Intellectual to Watch<\/em><\/a> (The Outsider’s Guides) by Ali Barthwell (Quirk Books)
\n34. Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life<\/em><\/a> by Alex Mayyasi, Hosts of NPR’s Planet Money (W. W. Norton)<\/span>
\n35. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents<\/em><\/a> by Lindsay C. Gibson (New Harbinger Publications)
\n36. The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Shambhala)<\/span>
\n37. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies<\/em><\/a> by Ph.D. Diamond, Jared (Norton)
\n38. What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory<\/em><\/a> by Brian Eno, Bette Adriaanse (Faber & Faber)
\n39. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
\n40. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering<\/em><\/a> by Joseph Nguyen (Authors Equity)<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Untitled-design-2-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"