Before Europe orientalized its eastern colonies, the Jew orientalized himself. Living in exile — amid the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the four Islamic caliphates — he…

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Museums,” the art historian Susanne Neubauer wrote, “are the place where things are transformed into objects.” In the case of BASQUIAT: THE UNKNOWN NOTEBOOKS, which is on view at the…

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What’s missing in contemporary war fiction

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The ongoing struggle for voting rights

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Studies continued to find that e-cigarettes are harmful in numerous ways, and the degree of harm varies among Banana Pudding (Southern Style), Hot Cinnamon Candies, and Menthol Tobacco flavors. Airplane…

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Solitary Confinement While reading Fenton Johnson’s essay [“Going It Alone,” Folio, April], I found myself thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer, a notorious misanthrope who, in solitude, developed one of the most…

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Percentage change since 2009 in the number of Americans who play football : –17 Who play rugby : +77 Factor by which female college soccer players are more likely than male players to suffer…

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By Mario Vargas Llosa, from Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society, out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vargas Llosa, who is the author…

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From descriptions of sex-tracking apps included in “Quantified Sex,” an article by Deborah Lupton, an Australian sociologist, that was published in the April 2015 issue of Culture, Health & Sexuality.

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From a March 1961 letter sent by Charles Bukowski to Jon Webb, the editor of The Outsider and an early champion of Bukowski’s work. Bukowski (1920–94) was the author of…

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From newspaper accounts since 2010 of incidents in which airplane passengers were removed or flights were rerouted in response to passenger behavior. Compiled by Shayla Love and Winston Choi-Schagrin.

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From summaries of police-brutality cases recently settled by the city of Baltimore. An investigation conducted last year by the Baltimore Sun found that police-misconduct settlements have cost the city nearly…

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From the FBI file on Lloyd Louis Brown, who wrote the prison novel Iron City (1951), edited several Communist journals, and coauthored Paul Robeson’s autobiography, Here I Stand. The file…

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For my birthday last year, my wife bought me three hours with Chris Davis, a master falconer and breeder of hawks. My time would be spent meeting the hawks that…

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By Frederic Morton, from a speech given at the Vienna Haus der Barmherzigkeit two days before he died, in April. Morton was a critic, an essayist, and the author of…

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From an experiment conducted by Fixr.com, a cost-estimating website. The experiment collected the top search queries suggested by Google for the phrase “How much does * cost in [country].”

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By Diane Williams, from FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, a story collection out next year from McSweeney’s. Williams’s story “Living Deluxe” appeared in the June 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

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By Seth Price, from his novel Fuck Seth Price, out last month from Leopard Press. Price’s earlier novel, How to Disappear in America, was published in 2008.

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By Elizabeth Willis, from a work in progress. New York Review Books published Willis’s sixth collection, Alive, in April. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

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This vague put-upon feeling had been bothering me for some time, but only recently did I finally realize that I’m just one victim of a vast conspiracy. Chances are that…

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The failed promise of the Affordable Care Act

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Photographs of airports by twenty photographers, with an essay by Geoff Dyer

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