Bread Loaf, Vermont August 18, 1951 Here was the first surprise: the great man was much heavier, his body much more solid, than I’d anticipated. You would not have called…

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The hope and hokum of immortality

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A pilgrimage to Ellen Altfest’s body paintings

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In his classic book On Liberty, the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill urged that man strive to become “a progressive being.” Mill defined progressivism as the cultivation of individuality;…

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Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University,…

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The foul legacy of Louisiana oil

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Divide and Conquer I was troubled by Nicholson Baker’s essay calling for the elimination of Algebra II from high school curricula [“Wrong Answer,” September], which fails to acknowledge the great…

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A hard death on the high road

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By John Crowley, from a lecture delivered in June at MoMA PS1 as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is            ”) series. Crowley’s article “Madame and the Masters” appeared…

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By Jonathan Littell, from The Fata Morgana Books, to be published this month by Two Lines Press. Littell is the author of several books, including The Kindly Ones. Translated from…

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From a transcript of a meeting held on August 6 by the town council of Deer Trail, Colorado. On July 2, Phillip Steel, a local resident, proposed an ordinance to…

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From a June 2013 blog post by Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor at the University of Miami who resigned last December after he was accused of failing to disclose a…

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From Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, by Jennifer Percy, to be published in January by Scribner. The book is an account of the two summers Percy spent reporting on a…

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The title of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), refers to “Lady Lazarus,” a poem Sylvia Plath wrote a few months before she committed…

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The poetry of Middle Eastern uprising

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Attentive fathers tend to have smaller testicles, pornography makes disagreeable Danish men more sexist, 61 percent of Papua New Guinean men are rapists, and 92 percent of Mexicans are relaxed…

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Date on which John Kerry called the crisis in Syria “our Munich moment” : 9/7/2013 On which Lyndon Johnson said that what “we learned . . . at Munich” committed us to intervention in Vietnam : 7/28/1965…

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By Dan Chiasson, from Bicentennial: Poems, to be published next year by Knopf. Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College. Little bird, little sugar cube, Tell me all the state secrets Of…

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From standard operating procedures for force-feeding prisoners at the U.S. military’s detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Al Jazeera released a recently updated version of the document in May, as 103…

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Going undercover with a cult infiltrator

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From titles to 160 romance novels by Barbara Cartland. Unpublished at the time of her death, in 2000, they are currently being released on BarbaraCartland.com as the The Pink Collection.…

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Buy the Book Mark Kingwell’s essay on the future of reading [“Beyond the Book,” Readings, August] reminds us that for hundreds of years books were the only tool that made…

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