As much as I love her, I blame Astrid. Astrid told my wife, Corinne, that she could achieve happiness if only she’d leave me. It sounded simple. “Leave that guy,…

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In 1929, Robert Ripley was receiving nearly 3,000 letters a day. As Neal Thompson writes in A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not!”…

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Willa Cather’s correspondence

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No and the magic system of advertising

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Visit harpers.org/puzzles to access our entire puzzle archive.

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A study of cuttlefish, deer mice, horses, humans, laboratory mice, meadow voles, pine voles, prairie voles, rats, rhesus macaques, and talas tucu-tucus suggested that males’ superior spatial and navigational skills…

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It’s dangerous to express optimism about the economy these days. Europe’s financial markets remain fragile. China, which supports much of the world’s economy through imports, is too dependent on highly…

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The radio was tuned to NPR, the subject was austerity, and the great observers of our political moment were speaking with their customary authority. The conversation wandered to and fro,…

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Mathematicians discovered a new prime number, 257,885,161 – 1, and the existence of a pseudoprime that is the sum of 10,333,229,505 known primes and contains roughly 295 billion digits but…

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Percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born : 13 Percentage that was foreign-born in 1913 : 15 Change in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States since 2007 : –900,000 Portion of…

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In search of a hero at the Bassmaster Classic

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Workers Undocumented In his report [“This Land Is Not Your Land,” February], Ted Genoways indicts a few citizens and politicians in Nebraska as a stand-in for the discrimination perpetrated by…

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Remembering the siege of Sarajevo

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The autumnal works of James Salter

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I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of thirty under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the…

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On the second floor of a characterless hotel in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar, a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom. His very British…

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How hippie Christians begat evangelical conservatives

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Some of the most interesting minds at work in the American arts today can be found in the video-game industry. Such designers as Jonathan Blow, Jenova Chen, Clint Hocking, Ken…

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From a letter to Mark Twain, postmarked October 1, 1879, from Carl Jensen, a customs officer in Stubbekøbing, Denmark. Twain’s annotation reads, “Preserve this remarkable letter.” Dear Mark Twain: Letters…

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By Karl Ove Knausgaard, from My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love, the second volume of his six-volume autobiographical novel, to be published next month by Archipelago Books. Translated…

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From In Search of a Concrete Music, by composer Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95), published last year for the first time in English by University of California Press. Published in French in…

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From a January 22 report by New Mexico State Police officer Clinton Norris. Tanner Ruane and Mark Staake were arrested before they carried out their plan and are awaiting trial.…

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By Lydia Davis, published in the 2013 issue of NOON. Davis’s “Five Stories from Flaubert” appeared in the November 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. I’m simply not interested in reading…

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By Claude Lévi-Strauss, from a 1986 lecture at the Ishizaka Foundation in Tokyo, included in Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World, published last month by Harvard University Press.…

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From the unpublished diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham (1847–65), son of John J. Gresham, twice mayor of Macon, Georgia. LeRoy, a longtime invalid confined to his bed or to a…

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By Hafiz (c. 1320–89), published in the November/December 2012 issue of The American Poetry Review. Translated by Matthew Rohrer, who consulted earlier English versions rather than the Persian.

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From Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985, out this month from Princeton University Press. Franco Maria Ricci, a publisher, commissioned Calvino to prepare a text for a volume containing reproductions of the…

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Is Marx still relevant?

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