Read more

From Two Cheers for Anarchism, published last month by Princeton University Press. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. In the summer of 1990, in an effort…

Read more

Rich men with big biceps tend to oppose the redistribution of wealth and poor men with big biceps tend to support it, whereas the weak are less strongly opinionated. The…

Read more

Harold Bilodeau’s ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, and Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he…

Read more

Fairy tales and the roots of literature

Read more

Dedicated to poet Jerome Rothenberg on the occasion of his eightieth birthday last year. Bernstein’s Recalculating will be published this spring by The University of Chicago Press. The town is…

Read more

The democratic fiction of Richard Brautigan

Read more

From This Is Yellowism, the website of Marcin Lodyga and Vladimir Umanets. In October, Umanets took credit for writing “Vladimir Umanets ’12, a potential piece of yellowism” on a painting…

Read more

From more than 8,000 letters to executives and directors of banks, posted last fall on the website Occupy the Boardroom and emailed to the addressees. A selection of 150 letters,…

Read more

Estimated percentage of North American pit-viper litters that are “virgin births” : 5 Percentage of freshmen at four-year colleges who declare “Roman Catholic” as their religious affiliation : 26 Who declare “None” : 25 Percentage of…

Read more

Cockfighting in the ruins of Kabul

Read more

From Servabo: A Fin de Siècle Memoir, first published in Italian in 1991, and included in Memories from the Twentieth Century, edited by Alberto Toscano, a collection of three of…

Read more

From God’s Law: The Only Political Solution, by Charles R. Fuqua, an e-book published in April and aiming to show how the Bible can be applied to U.S. law. Fuqua,…

Read more

A paean 2 Prince

Read more

The American dream has never been the rags-to-riches fable of the Horatio Alger stories. But there once was a real American dream, and it went like this: If you work…

Read more

From an April 18, 2011, letter by Didier Mangione, the national secretary of the French union Unité SGP Police, to Hubert Weigel, head of France’s riot police. Weigel banned on-duty…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

The Gregorian, Julian, Coptic, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Tibetan, Zoroastrian, and Mesoamerican calendars—and the Mayan, which predicts that the world will end just days after this issue reaches your hands—all…

Read more

From the July 2007 issue of HMI Profil, the newsletter of Hamburg-Mannheimer International, a German insurance company. In June 2007, HMI hired at least twenty prostitutes to entertain insurance salesmen…

Read more

Apocalypses are lots of fun. They bring excitement to our otherwise boring lives. They smash through the smug façade of everyday authority. And it’s a blast to imagine the exact…

Read more

An economic companion to the Messiah

Read more

In Memoriam Harper’s Magazine is deeply saddened by the recent deaths of two good friends. George McGovern had served on the Harper’s Magazine Foundation board of directors since 1990, Nikolai…

Read more

Face to face with the infinite

Read more

From a letter sent in January to the Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina newspaper, by Danny Hembree, a fifty-year-old death-row inmate at Raleigh’s Central Prison. Hembree was found guilty last…

Read more

Read more

Percentage change since 2010 in the per-pound cost of a Thanksgiving turkey : +22 Portion of the total U.S. corn crop that goes to make ethanol : 2/5 Estimated number of chickens killed after…

Read more