Garry Winogrand's late sprint

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Infinity and Beyond Near the end of Alan Lightman’s essay on humanity’s understanding of the infinite [“Our Place in the Universe,” December], he considers what a small fraction of the…

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Electoral College Victoria Collier’s report on the precariousness of this country’s voting system [“How to Rig an Election,” November] voices legitimate concerns but misdirects its anxiety. Many election-integrity advocates have…

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Neuroscientists found that voluntary forgetting happens through not-remembering as well as through remembering something else; other neuroscientists replaced subjects’ memories of enjoying cocaine with less exciting ones. Shy rainbow trout…

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Number of signatures a petition posted on whitehouse.gov must obtain within thirty days to “require a response” : 25,000 Number a petition calling for Texas to secede from the Union obtained within…

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As President Obama begins his second term, our gross domestic product is in recovery mode. But the jobs market is still in a Great Recession. Unemployment hovers stubbornly around 8…

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From A History of Future Cities, by Daniel Brook, to be published next month by W. W. Norton. Brook’s article “New Hampshire Goddam” appeared in the November 2012 issue of…

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From Responding to Climate Change in New York State, a November 2011 report prepared for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Rising sea levels and extreme weather…

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From the instruction manual for Catan: Oil Springs, a scenario-expansion kit for the board game The Settlers of Catan. Developed by the Worldwatch Institute and the game’s manufacturers, the scenario…

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From comments on the Facebook page of the Jefferson County, Alabama, sheriff’s office, posted last January in response to a photo of Dustin McCombs, who was wanted on charges of…

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From a selection of openings to abandoned short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner included in Five Dials number 25. As part of an ongoing project, Gartner issues adoption certificates to readers who request…

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Inauguration Day is upon us. And it seems like only yesterday that the colossal, overheating machinery of democracy, which had been running in high gear for almost two years, finally…

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From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder, who fabricated mock books with the fake titles. The New York Public Library re-created part…

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From almost 2,000 comments about student loans sent to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and released on its website last June. Americans currently owe more than $1 trillion in outstanding…

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From source material quoted by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an eleventh-century scholar, in his humorous survey of Islamic scholarship concerning uninvited guests. Selections from the Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq, abridged and translated…

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From a response by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) to a question by Serena Vitale, during an interview in Moscow in December 1978. Yevgeni Polivanov, who like Shklovsky…

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From Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera by Dave Malloy based on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which ran last fall at Ars Nova in New York City.…

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From comments on the Wikipedia entry for the Beatles. Last fall, Wikipedia conducted a community-wide poll to settle the below dispute, which began in 2004. Users voted for lowercase “the.”…

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By Gordon Lish, from the fall 2012 issue of Salmagundi. A new edition of Lish’s novel Peru (1986) will be published next month by Dalkey Archive Press. I do not…

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By A. R. Ammons (1926–2001), from the Summer/Autumn 2012 issue of Chicago Review. If one of these helicopters tried to put down in my yard, the branches of my many…

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