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Archive: 2016

Harper’s Index

Portion of TSA funding that is spent on surface transportation : 1/50 Percentage by which U.S. railway fatalities outnumbered aviation fatalities last year : 78 Percentage change since 2014 in the number of U.S.…

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The Curse

By Javier Marías, from To Begin at the Beginning, a reflection on the art of writing fiction. The book was published in October by Sylph Editions as part of their…

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Trigger Warning

From a list of objects that were mistaken for guns during shootings of civilians by police in the United States since 2001.

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Standing Rock Speaks

Only as a story will this make sense. One morning in August, craving company, I walked around the corner from my apartment in Livingston, Montana, and sat down at the…

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Grammar Yahtzee

From a post on Object Dreams, a Tumblr blog. The post is a rewriting of The Elements of Style using predictive text, a program that assists typing by anticipating which…

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Candid Camera

From transcripts of conversations between Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban-American playwright and director, and Michelle Memran, a filmmaker. Memran’s documentary about Fornes’s life, The Rest I Make Up, is currently…

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Prose by Any Other Name

From interviews conducted by journalists and readers with Elena Ferrante since 2003. The correspondence is included in Frantumaglia, a collection of Ferrante’s papers that was published last month by Europa…

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Only a Game

From a letter written by Karl Ove Knausgaard to Fredrik Ekelund, a novelist, in 2014. The letter was included in Home and Away, a collection of their letters about the…

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Edible Arrangement

From a list of nontraditional tableware at restaurants. The list was compiled by We Want Plates, a food blog.

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Hungry Souls

From emails sent by Maria Bistline, a manager at the food storehouse for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to Preston Barlow, a church official. The emails…

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Sound And Fury

By Peter Handke, from The Moravian Night, which was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Handke is the author of more than a dozen novels. Translated from the…

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Still Life

From exercises designed by Marina Abramovic, a Serbian performance artist, for student workshops that she taught in the 1990s. Abramovic’s memoir, Walk Through Walls, was published in October by Crown…

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A Man of Limited

By Cyrus Console, from a manuscript in progress. Console is the author of The Odicy (Omnidawn).

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The New Red Scare

Reviving the art of threat inflation

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Separated at Birth

An inquiry over time into the luckiest generation

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The Priest in the Trees

Feral faith in the age of climate change

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The Lightness

A Charlie Hebdo cartoonist finds refuge from terror

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With Child

The right to choose in Rapid City

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So Subtle a Catch

The illicit attraction of the lowly carp

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Cast Away

The illicit attraction of the lowly carp

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Cold Fish

Key West is Neil’s idea, and Mara can’t think of a reason to refuse. She knows next to nothing about the Keys, only that it’s expensive to buy bread and…

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New Books

“I understand the large hearts of heroes,” wrote an ecstatic Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”: The courage of present times and all times, How the skipper saw the crowded…

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Likely Story

The inventions of Javier Marías

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Destruction Myth

The rise and fall of the Romanovs

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December 2016

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