Looking for love in the age of Tinder

Read more

For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he emails to…

Read more

THE VEGETARIAN (Hogarth, $21) is the first — there will be more, let’s hope — of Han Kang’s novels to arrive in the United States. Published in South Korea in 2007, the…

Read more

In December, on the eve of Pearl Harbor Day, President Obama spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the attack in San Bernardino, California, that left fourteen people…

Read more

Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov’s half-century

Read more

Can art make anything happen?

Read more

Read more

Researchers debuted the Geek Culture Engagement Scale, which quantifies participation in such activities as Renaissance faires, screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and B.D.S.M. Female U.S. college students with…

Read more

Read more

The Secret History Randall Kennedy’s claim that respectability politics has “improved the racial situation dramatically” [“Lifting as We Climb,” Essay, October], overstates the centrality of that phenomenon to black freedom…

Read more

I have come to perceive a cosmos filled with superintelligent beings — a virtually infinite number of them, whose minds have transcended their earthbound bodies and are independent of any…

Read more

Factor by which a U.S. drone strike is more likely than a conventional U.S. air strike to kill civilians : 10 Estimated percentage of people killed in U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan…

Read more

From The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, a memoir by Austin Reed, published this month by Random House. Likely completed in 1858, the manuscript was discovered at…

Read more

By Kenneth Irby (1936–2015), whose collected poems, The Intent On, was published by North Atlantic Books in 2009.

Read more

Read more

Read more

From posts by residents of Oakland, California, to NextDoor and Glenfriends, two online social networks for neighbors.

Read more

From a complaint filed in October 2014 on behalf of a woman who was harassed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Harris County, Texas. In October 2015,…

Read more

From a mathematics textbook for children between six and twelve years old, published by the Islamic State’s ministry of education. The Islamic State distributed copies of the textbook to schools…

Read more

From Living on Paper, a collection of Iris Murdoch’s letters published next month by Princeton University Press and Chatto & Windus. Murdoch (1919–99) was the author of numerous novels, including The…

Read more

Read more

By David Searcy, from Shame and Wonder, a collection of essays that was published this month by Random House. Searcy is the author of two novels, including Last Things (2002).

Read more

From queries submitted by telephone and in person to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989.

Read more

Read more

The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the universe

Read more

Why is the Universe as it is and not something else? Why is the Universe here at all? It is true that at present we have no clue to the…

Read more

The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

Read more

An end-of-life doctor faces his own end

Read more