What better way to escape the anxieties of our own gilded age than to bask in those of the 1880s? Julian Fellowes’ upstairs-downstairs drama returns to high-society New York City as the battle between new and old money rages on. Having vaulted up the social ladder, Carrie Coon’s Bertha Russell is confronting the marital fallout. Across the street, Christine Baranski’s Agnes van Rhijn prepares to host President Grover Cleveland even as sister Ada, played by Cynthia Nixon, maintains a grip on the family purse strings. Expect the tensions between the Russells and van Rhijns to erupt into all-out war. Sunday, Nov. 1, at 9 p.m., HBO and HBO Max

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest best seller is “a triumph of blood-and-thunder narrative history,” said Sean McMeekin in The Wall Street Journal. At a time when conflict in the Middle East is again touching lives around the world, the British historian has delivered a sweeping and energetic account of the region’s turbulent last 125 years. Beginning in 1902, when the young prince Ibn Saud seized Riyadh to puncture Ottoman dominance, “Montefiore doesn’t play favorites, subjecting all his characters to scrutiny.” We get British and French meddling during and after World War I, the dramatic reset brought on by the next global conflict, and Cold War machinations that enflamed new conflicts. Then comes the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which Montefiore characterizes as epochal in its impact. “Not all his stories are original,” of course, “but he enriches them with fascinating details.” 

“While vast in scope, The Cauldron is written in a way that is equally accessible to regional experts and neophytes,” said Jonathan Harounoff in the New York Post. Often, his story is carried by “the compelling and, at times, insidious characters who helped forge the Middle East we know today.” Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, Qatar’s founding emir, sired 56 children. King Farouk, who ruled Egypt for 16 years, was addicted to gambling, food, and sex. As Montefiore marches readers though various crises and flashpoints, said Mark Urban in The Times (U.K.), he shows a determination to nail down which actors deserve blame. “Time and again,” he shows that the region’s leaders have been more than mere puppets, having more agency than self-regarding Westerners might suspect. And though he rips into Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, today’s Israeli right wing, and many other regional players, “this is not a polemic but a work of history in which his judgments are rooted in deep research.” 

The astonishing scope of the book is “both its greatest strength and its principal weakness,” said Sam Kiley in The Independent (U.K.). At his best, Montefiore “can make a complicated political order suddenly legible through a few deft sentences,” but the pileup of rulers, coups, and wars at times becomes “so dense that the reader can struggle to retain a firm sense of causation.” He also “distributes sympathy unevenly,” favoring pragmatists over fervent believers and, subtly, Israelis over Palestinians in the Middle East conflict that so often looms largest in the minds of outsiders. Montefiore is “too candid about Israeli wrongdoing to be described as an apologist.” Better yet, he’s written a book that anyone could learn from. “Its scholarship, range, and vitality make it an impressive achievement.”

The programmer who guided the moon landing

When Margaret Hamilton took her first computer job, it was supposed to be a temporary detour for her career. The young mathematician planned to support her husband while he attended law school, then earn a doctorate and become a professor. But when she saw a want ad from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab seeking developers for the software to “send man to the moon,” her path was set. The first female programmer hired for NASA’s Apollo project, by 1968 she was leading the 100-­person team writing the code that powered the Apollo guidance computer—and had coined the term “software engineer.” Her work was integral to the success of all six Apollo voyages, including the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. In those days “software was a mystery, a black box,” she said. “We had to find a way, and we did.” 

Born in small-town Indiana, Margaret Heafield was the daughter of a college professor father and high school teacher mother, said The New York Times. After earning a math degree at Earlham College and marrying, she moved to Cambridge, Mass., so her husband could attend Harvard Law. Her first MIT job was writing weather-­prediction software under Edward Lorenz, the “father of modern chaos theory.” Then she developed programs for the Air Force to detect enemy aircraft. These jobs were open to women because “many managers viewed programmers as glorified typists,” said The Times (U.K.). Her work for NASA involved “handwriting code on sheets of paper and feeding boxes of hole-punched cards into a wardrobe-size mainframe.” Apollo’s onboard computers held only 72 kilobytes of memory; an iPhone 16 has more than 7 million times that amount. 

A standout problem solver, Hamilton was known for “software that could anticipate and solve errors on its own,” said NPR.org. That paid off minutes before Apollo 11 was due to land on the moon, when alarms went off “signifying computer overload.” Her team “had built a system that could shut down unnecessary background tasks,” allowing the landing to continue. Later, she worked on Skylab and a design of the space shuttle before leaving MIT in 1976 to found a software company. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, she spoke often about the thrill of her NASA work. “Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world,” she said. “There was no choice but to be pioneers.”