Poetic Justice Attacks on contemporary poetry in general as too obscure, too private, and in thrall to specialists — attacks such as Mark Edmundson’s essay in the July issue [“Poetry Slam”] —…

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September 15 will mark five years since the beginning of the economic slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already by that day in…

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In 1972, the economics department at Harvard denied tenure to the leftist professor Samuel Bowles. Responding to the decision in the Harvard Crimson, Bowles asserted that he had been passed…

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Number of refugees and internally displaced people in the world last year : 45,200,000 Last year in which there were as many : 1994 Number of hours Chinese workers held the head of a…

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By Jonathan Franzen, from a footnote to his translation of “Nestroy and Posterity,” a 1912 essay by the Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). In the…

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From previously unpublished descriptions of Adolf Hitler’s responses to films he watched in 1938 and 1939. The notes, written by Hitler’s adjutants as part of daily records of his activities…

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From an April 30 police report and subsequent affidavit on the arrest of Jacob Forster, a graduate student in chemistry at Washington State University, who is charged with the attempted…

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By A. A. Milne, published in the January 1919 issue of The Green Book, a literary journal by and for staff of British Military Intelligence unit MI7b, which created propaganda during…

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From documents submitted by Sue Grant, an expert witness, in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Henry’s Turkey Service, the operator of a turkey-processing plant…

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From emails exchanged by employees of the U.S. State Department, an anonymous Iraqi man known here by the pseudonym Omar, and Omar’s brother. In 2011, Omar, who had worked as…

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By Arlette Farge, from The Allure of the Archives, published this month for the first time in English by Yale University Press. Farge is a historian of eighteenth-century France and…

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From observational notes cited in “Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography of Advertising Response in the Family Living Room,” by the Australian researchers Laknath Jayasinghe and Mark Ritson, in the June…

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By Amos Oz, from the story collection Between Friends, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Oz is the author of several books, including, most recently, Jews and Words. Translated…

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A story created as part of TimeSlips, a dementia-treatment program in which groups of patients are shown photographs and prompted to narrate them, in order to replace “the pressure to…

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The case against Algebra II

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The campaign against SodaStream

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Photographs from Iran

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Symptoms, signs, and the riddle of Morgellons

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A racial education

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At the end of a chapter on Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus, in Confronting the Classics (Liveright, $28.95), the Cambridge scholar Mary Beard reminds us that when…

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The unspent life of J. F. Powers

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Critiques of a life online

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