When Barack Obama met Genevieve Cook in 1983 at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village, it was the start of his most serious romance yet. But as the 22-year-old Columbia grad began to shape his future, he was also struggling with his identity: American or international? Black or white? Drawing on conversations with both Cook and the president, David Maraniss has the untold story of the couple’s time together.

Fifteen years after the handover to mainland China, Hong Kong residents worry that their identity—and their freedoms—are slipping away.

When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man. The fourth volume of that work, like its three predecessors a giant achievement and certain best seller, is about to be published. But Caro is not done. And until he is done, one part of the world that we will never see again will not die.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, the country is full of unprecedented hope—and gnawing fear.

If you think Mitt Romney is too mild, too "golly gee," too Mormon, to survive the shark tank of a modern presidential campaign, his answer is Eric Fehrnstrom. He's Mitt's most trusted adviser and the guy whom Romney turns to when someone's leg needs breaking. (Figuratively, of course.) If Karl Rove was Bush's brain, then Fehrnstrom gives his boss what he most dearly needs—a backbone.

The real war on women is in the Middle East.

If you want to start a peaceful revolution, the person to call is a Serb with a passion for Tolkien. Srdja Popovic is advising rebels in 40 countries. Emma Williams watches him at work and at home…

Mitt who?

How far are the Catholic bishops willing to go with their crackdown on reproductive health? Just ask a teenage girl forced into prostitution.