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A special family lived around the corner from us at our beach house. How were they special? There were three children when most other families had two children. As a…

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The memoir is a tempting but treacherous form. As the English novelist Rachel Cusk writes in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20), “Unclothed, truth can be…

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A stroll through our cities

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Uncovering Iran’s coup

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Live Free or Die Trying Michael Ames suggests that the future of the Republican Party may be the Ron Paul movement [“The Awakening,” Letter from Tampa, April], but the Ron…

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Last spring I sat on a panel convened to discuss the publication of The Occupy Handbook, a collection of essays in which a number of prominent economists addressed issues raised…

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Percentage change in the past twenty-five years in the Consumer Price Index : +41 In the price of beer : +40 Of books : –1 Number of students currently attending the thirteen Washington, D.C., public schools…

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In matters of foreign policy, Congress, and especially the Senate, was designed as a hedge against the abuses exhibited by European monarchs who for centuries had whimsically entangled their countries…

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From a June 7, 1923, letter sent to the personal secretary of Leon Trotsky, then Russian minister of defense, by the Nestle Laboratory for Hair Research in New York City,…

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From remarks in the Montana State Legislature concerning a bill allowing drivers to salvage the carcasses of antelope, deer, elk, and moose killed in automobile accidents. In 2011, there were…

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From The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, dictated by Virginia Woolf to her nephew Quentin Bell when he was a child. Between 1923 and 1927, Bell and his brother Julian hand-produced a…

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From 2,945 occupations listed in the current edition of India’s National Classification of Occupations. Spinning Master Taxing Master Numismatist Rock Slicer Impression Taker Weather Observer

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The writer for Harper’s Magazine had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a…

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From a recording of a 1983 meeting between Orson Welles, the film director Henry Jaglom, and an HBO executive. Beginning in 1978, Jaglom met Welles regularly for lunch, and at…

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From an open letter written in March by Bernhard Paul, founder and director of Germany’s Circus Roncalli, to Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic candidate for German chancellor, who in February…

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By Diane Williams, from a collection in progress. Williams’s most recent book is Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. True! Yes! Mother always gave me a tribute with a sigh. I…

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By Patrizia Cavalli, from My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems, a bilingual edition to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cavalli is the author of…

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The gun Congress can’t ban

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China’s Wild West gets tamed

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A blueprint for the failure of low-income housing

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How leprosy teaches empathy

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