Most Americans are familiar with the 1787 compromise that sought to bring North-South equality to Congressional representation by counting slaves as three fifths of a person, or three fifths of…

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The contradictions of Cass Sunstein

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The story of a morbid curiosity

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The evolution of a flawed species

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Autistic children sit for an extra seventy minutes per day; have extra, unpruned synapses in the brain, which may be prunable with drugs that restore brain cells’ autophagy; and exhibit…

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A comment on the fiction of the ’fifties

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Then It’s Settled As someone who has been to Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank eight times as a human rights observer and peace activist, I was struck by Khalil…

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Chance that a Republican voter has thought about the midterm elections “only a little” : 1 in 3 That a Democratic voter has : 1 in 2 Percentage of midterm campaign advertisements that have…

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By Meline Toumani, adapted from her first book, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, out this month from Metropolitan…

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By Wis?awa Szymborska, from Map: Collected and Last Poems, due out next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Szymborska (1923–2012), a Polish poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in…

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From a list of items available for purchase by local police departments through Department of Homeland Security grants.

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By Claudia Rankine, from Citizen: An American Lyric, published last month by Graywolf Press. Rankine is the author of several books of poems, including Plot, The End of the Alphabet,…

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Though I have been hearing (or rather reading) it a lot lately in many venues, it was a little odd — even a bit unsettling — to read it in the New…

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From hypothetical situations imagined by U.S. Supreme Court justices during oral arguments presented in the 2013 term. Compiled by Viviane Fairbank.

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From La Colère du Tigre, a play by Philippe Madral about the friendship between Georges Clemenceau and Claude Monet, which premiered at the Théâtre Montparnasse in Paris in September. After…

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From Ways of Curating, by Hans Ulrich Obrist, out this month from Faber and Faber. Obrist is the codirector of exhibitions and programs and of international projects at the Serpentine…

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From a list of 1,266 musical genres compiled by Glenn McDonald, creator of everynoise.com, which seeks to produce a comprehensive music-classification system.

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By Rachel Kushner, from The Strange Case of Rachel K, out in February 2015 from New Directions. Kushner is the author of the novels Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers.

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From message-board comments posted on the website of Seattle’s Mars Hill megachurch under the name William Wallace II, recently revealed to be the church’s pastor and cofounder Mark Driscoll. Driscoll…

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From the Indiegogo funding-campaign profile for AR Wear, described as “wearable protection for when things go wrong.” The company surpassed its $50,000 funding goal last year and is currently at…

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Interviews with fighters, enemies, and potential recruits

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A visit to the egg farm

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