From “Voyage Alone in the Rob Roy,” which appeared in the May 1868 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay — along with the magazine’s entire 164-year archive — is available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.

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The dignity and challenge of solitude

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Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic

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A father and son’s story

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The catastrophic incompetence of Citigroup

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How elite youth basketball exploits African athletes

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Toni Morrison’s novels — a formidable shelf of eleven by now, as the author settles in to her mid-eighties — have all been catholicons, correctives to the canon. That strong, sensuous diction —…

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Torture, treachery, and the CIA

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels of remembering

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Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who…

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In 492 b.c., an Athenian tragedian named Phrynichus made the disastrous decision to premiere a play about recent political events — as far as we know, the first drama in…

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From Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, edited by Walter Kempowski, out this month from W. W. Norton. On April 25, 1945, Soviet…

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First, she tries counting. The numbers move sluggishly through her head in single file, like people in a line at the post office or at the bank or at the…

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From “Prevent Duty Guidance: A Consultation,” a paper issued last December by the U.K. Home Office. The U.K.’s counterterrorism strategy, CONTEST, comprises four branches: Prevent, Pursue, Protect, and Prepare. Channel…

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By Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, from The Turnip Princess, published last month by Penguin Classics. In the 1850s, Schönwerth traveled through Bavaria, his homeland, to record its tales. Much of…

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From Sufi Lyrics, by Bullhe Shah, published by Harvard University Press in January as part of the Murty Classical Library of India. Bullhe Shah was an eighteenth-century Sufi poet and…

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From descriptions of BuzzFeed in the New York Times between 2007 and 2014. BuzzFeed was founded in 2006.

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From an incident report written by a deputy in the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office, in Okeechobee, Florida. The office occasionally responds to requests from parents seeking oversight from law enforcement…

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By Nell Zink, from Mislaid, a novel, out in May from Ecco. Her previous novel, The Wallcreeper, was published last year.

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Many of the furries are themselves talented artists who design and construct their own fur suits. A large proportion of furries collect both erotic and nonerotic furry art. The adult-themed…

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From The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis, by Garry Wills, out this month from Viking. Wills holds the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Chair at Emory and is…

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From a conversation with Raul, a resident of Manhattan, included in The Edge Becomes the Center, an oral history of gentrification in New York City, by D. W. Gibson, out…

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By David Graeber, from The Utopia of Rules, published last month by Melville House. Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His most recent article for Harper’s…

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Langston Hughes in letters

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How the CIA infiltrated student politics

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When inviting a bear from darkest Peru into your terraced London house, the first thing to do is increase the coverage on your homeowners’ insurance policy. “Yes, a bear .…

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Mr. Earnshaw went to Liverpool and he came back with a boy: a “gipsy brat,” a thing hardly human, an “it” talking “over and over again some gibberish that nobody…

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