Excerpted from "The Man Without a Face" by Masha Gessen

Encouraged by his former deputy’s meteoric rise, Sobchak decided to end his Paris exile and go back to Russia in the summer of 1999. He returned full of hope and even more full of ambition. As Sobchak was leaving Paris, Arkady Vaksberg, a forensics specialist turned investigative reporter and author with whom Sobchak had become friendly during his years in France, asked him whether he hoped to return to Paris as an ambassador. “Higher than that,” replied Sobchak. Vaksberg was sure the former mayor was aiming for the foreign minister’s seat: the rumor in Moscow’s political circles was that Sobchak would head up the Constitutional Court, the most important court in the country.

White House officials are already criticizing journalist Ron Suskind's book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President," which just came out this week, despite having cooperated with Suskind for years. Among the book's more controversial passages are depictions of the Obama White House as dysfunctional, with mean, misogynistic economic advisers undermining a clueless president at every turn. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said, "I lived the original and the reality I lived, we all lived together, bears no relation to the sad little stories I heard reported from that book." White House Press Secretary Jay Carney went even further and accused Suskind of plagiarism, saying, "one passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia."

In today’s world, it’s not unusual to wake up alone, drive to work alone, and eat our meals alone. It’s expected that most of our communicating will take place through machines, rather than face to face. And it’s not unusual for us to develop relationships with those machines, whether they’re our cell phones or GPS devices. But what does all this isolation do to us? And does technology make our isolation better or worse?

100 years ago this February, a ten-pound future president was born in Illinois, feet first. His name was Ronald Wilson Reagan. While he eventually came to be a household name, first as an actor, then as a politician, the details of Ronald Reagan's personal life have always been more or less private. Even his own son, Ron Reagan, wasn’t fully sure of his dad’s story, until he set out to learn more about him. 

“Zora and Me” fictionalizes the childhood of the Harlem Renaissance writer, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. (Hurston was born in 1891, lived through the Jim Crow south, and died in 1960.) The young adult novel is the first in a planned trilogy which imagines Hurston as a girl detective in her all-black hometown of Eatonville, Florida, at the start of the 20^th century.

For most people living outside of the Gulf, Hurricane Katrina was a tragedy represented by tens of thousands of nameless faces. People waved frantically from rooftops or crowded into the Superdome, returning home only to find their houses and possessions destroyed. However, for fans of the award-winning graphic novel “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,” by Josh Neufeld, there are very specific names and faces attached to Katrina. Those people aren't just characters in a book either – they are real people. Five years after the hurricane, we follow up with two of them to see where their lives – and their city – are today.