From previously unpublished excerpts of a 1978 interview with Susan Sontag by Jonathan Cott. An edited version of the interview appeared in the October 4, 1979, issue of Rolling Stone.…

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Jane Campion’s moral wilderness

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The dismal future of the global fishery

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Exchanging Fire Dan Baum misses the mark for the best way to control gun violence [“How to Make Your Own AR-15,” Report, June]. The truth is that guns don’t kill…

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It’s rare, in economics as in life, to get a second chance. Though economists are constantly learning lessons from past mistakes, seldom are there obvious opportunities to apply them. The…

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Estimated number of Americans who have top-secret security clearance : 1,400,000 Average annual cost of detaining an inmate at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay : $900,000 At a supermax prison in the United…

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By Mark Kingwell, from a keynote speech delivered in May at the annual meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada and published in the Ottawa Citizen. Kingwell is a professor…

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From comments included in a petition addressed to the artist Kenneth Goldsmith, the website UbuWeb, and LABOR gallery in Mexico City, who in May jointly issued a call for volunteers…

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From a complaint filed against several bloggers by John Steele, an Illinois attorney whose firm, Prenda Law, claims its mission is to fight copyright piracy. According to court documents, Prenda…

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By Gretchen Marquette, published in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Marquette lives and works in Minneapolis.

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By Vaishali Raode, from Mi Hijra, Mi Lakshmi (“I Am a Hijra, I Am Lakshmi”), an account of the life of Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi, a transgender-rights activist in the Indian…

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Suppose we decide to take a look at the Sixties from a fresh perspective. Suppose we start not with politicians, or soldiers in Vietnam, or civil rights protesters, or Woodstock…

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From “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” by S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, Rebecca Roache, published last year in Ethics, Policy & Environment. A widely cited report by the United Nations…

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From Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, published last year by Oxford University Press. An encyclopedic treatment of oneiromancy, or prophecy through dream interpretation, the five books were written in the second to early…

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By László Krasznahorkai, from Seiobo There Below, published last month by New Directions. Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary in 1954. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. He already knew…

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I am a sleep hunter. I track sleep through my house. I track it with a flashlight, and a bottle of pills, and two pillows, and a blanket, and a…

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At first I dreaded having to investigate the history of sleep. Human slumber appeared impervious to time and place, stubbornly immune to the element of change animating most works of…

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Maximilian in the basement watched TV every night. I lay on a mattress on the floor in the apartment above him. He’d turn on the news around ten, fall asleep,…

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Whereas child bed wetters in sixteenth-century England had been directed for their malady to consume the testicles of a hedgehog or the windpipe of a cock, Enlightenment science, which rejected…

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As a holistic nutritionist, I often work with people who have trouble sleeping. Some wake throughout the night; others jolt up at two a.m. and are unable to return to…

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In 1755 the naturalist Stepan Krasheninnikov observed the Amanita muscaria mushroom’s effects on Russian soldiers in Siberia ingesting it for the first time. Claiming to have been seized by an…

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If only sleep could be hoarded, accumulated, and traded; if only you could store it up for a rainy day or borrow it from friends or buy it on the…

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