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Archive: 2015

Harper’s Index

Average age, in years, of the thirty most frequently played holiday songs : 61 Year when the youngest of these songs, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” was released : 1994…

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Power in Paris

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

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Invisible City

By Justin E. H. Smith, from a work in progress. Smith’s fourth book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton), will be published in June. At the end of August, the oldest…

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Thanks, Obama

From entries made since 2009 to the U.S. Protocol Gift Unit Federal Register Report, which records items given by foreign dignitaries to federal employees.

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Pain Quotidien

From a list of approximately 70,000 diagnostic codes included in the International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification, which was adopted by U.S. health-care providers in October.

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Shit Talkers

From an audio recording entered as evidence in a 2014 lawsuit filed by a man identified as D.B., who claims that he inadvertently recorded his colonoscopy on his cell phone.…

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Seminal Theories

From Of Beards and Men, by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, which will be published next month by the University of Chicago Press. Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State…

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Naked Ambition

From a contract prepared by a casting agency for extras in the television show Westworld, which is scheduled to air on HBO next year.

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Road to Nowhere

By László Krasznahorkai, from Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a travel memoir that will be published next month by Seagull Books. Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.…

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1/29/84 N.Y.C.

By Allen Ginsberg (1926–97), from Wait Till I’m Dead, a volume of his uncollected poems that will be published by Grove Atlantic in February.

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The Bed-Rest Hoax

The case against a venerable pregnancy treatment

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Blast from the Past

The Battle of Waterloo turns 200

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The Counterparty

Can Bosnia escape the stranglehold of ethnic politics?

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Riding the Night

All the way, at odd times, far off, with neither sense nor sequence, the guns have sounded almost like the noises of peace — blasting or pile-driving. Now, outside the…

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Motes from Underground

Will cave soil save us from drug-resistant superbugs?

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Getting to the End

Gambling and suicide in Atlantic City

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Too Good to Be True

Harriet says she will take Gayle to A.A. meetings. Lois offers to pay her extra for gas and time, but Harriet says no, being of service is essential to her…

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Slender Mercies

The gospel according to Extreme Weight Loss

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New Books

In the harsh winter of 1895, Tolstoy wrote a story called “Master and Man,” which tells of a merchant named Brekhunov who, on a day that threatens a blizzard, orders…

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New Drama

At the beginning of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the top-secret Impossible Mission Force (I.M.F.) is disbanded after a congressional investigation deems it too reckless. Now Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)…

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Findings

A jaguar named Salman was sent away from the Delhi zoo for being too fat to mate, and a former meerkat expert at the London Zoo was ordered to pay…

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December 2015

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