What We Are Reading Today: Midnight in Chernobyl

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Updated 10 March 2020
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What We Are Reading Today: Midnight in Chernobyl

Author: Adam Higginbotham

It is a definitive and dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research.
Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the US’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one.
“Midnight in Chernobyl,” award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy, according to review published on goodreads.com.
The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told — until now.
Journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland.


What We Are Reading Today: Michelangelo and Titian

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Updated 06 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Michelangelo and Titian

Author: William E. Wallace

In 1529, Michelangelo was in Venice when he first met Titian, Venice’s famed painter of princes, gods, and goddesses. Coming face-to-face with Titian’s drama-infused, richly colored works, the creator of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling realized he had met a worthy opponent. Twenty-five years later, Titian came to Rome to paint the pope, and the two met again. Painting in the Vatican, Titian experienced the full power of Michelangelo’s work and vowed to surpass the achievements of his older contemporary.

Michelangelo and Titian is the untold story of history’s greatest artistic rivalry, a competition between two monumental figures more admiring of one another than either would ever admit. William Wallace brings the world of the 16th century to life, and in particular its culture of gossip and intrigue.

Wallace challenges the established narrative of this relationship as mostly one-sided, with the younger artist in competition with the reigning master.