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We have a new president who is also a new kind of president. Our previous chief executives — at least those of the post–World War II era — were not…

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He is perhaps the best speaker in America of this generation, but his speech before the huge crowd in the U.N. Plaza on that afternoon in mid-April was bad; his…

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The outsized pleasures of the very small

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What awaits Trump in Afghanistan

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Black America’s civil war over gay rights

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When I read Graham Foust, I’m put in mind of both Wallace Stevens and Johnny Cash. (Foust, who was born in Tennessee, entitled one poem “Nuances of a Theme by…

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(1) To need his glasses and be struck by an awareness that they are not at hand, an ordinary enough circumstance for Frederick Douglass, except sometimes it’s accompanied by a…

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George Saunders is the most humane American writer working today. He need not ask, as Sheila Heti did in the title of her novel, how a person should be. He…

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The rise of vindictive nationalism

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Paul Auster’s multitudes

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Donald Trump called for a “standard protocol dedicated for acquiring adjacent nonneoplastic tissue that minimizes neoplasm contamination” and concluded that outcomes following robot-assisted cystectomy were better with optimal rather than…

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Left Out I want to thank Thomas Frank for his insightful article on the media’s treatment of Bernie Sanders [“Swat Team,” Essay, November]. Like many Americans, I initially dismissed Bernie’s…

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A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side, to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and…

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Only once have we elected a really ignorant man to the Presidency. Andrew Jackson was almost completely innocent of book-learning when he came to the White House. Furthermore, he was…

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For years, whenever I was in New Orleans, I used to run past an equestrian statue just outside the voluptuously green City Park. Though it is situated at a major…

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Percentage by which the number of international borders with barriers has increased since 2014: 48 Year in which the U.S. Census Bureau may add a category for people from the…

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By Daphne Merkin, from This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression, a memoir that will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Merkin is the author of…

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By Karen Solie, from a manuscript in progress. Solie is the author of several collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015).

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From a list of phrases used in various languages to describe a sun-shower, the phenomenon of the sun shining while it rains. The phrases were compiled by Bert Vaux, a…

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From a complaint filed in an Illinois circuit court last year by Robert Rialmo, a Chicago police officer, against the family of Quintonio LeGrier, a nineteen-year-old black man who was…

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From affidavits written by people across the United States that were included in a lawsuit brought against the Department of Homeland Security by the Immigration Reform Law Institute. The lawsuit,…

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By Dubravka Ugrešic, from an essay that was published in the September/October issue of World Literature Today. Ugrešic is the author of more than a dozen books. She was the…

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