Blame Game Joy Gordon perpetuates a number of untruths regarding the United States’ policy toward Cuba [“El Bloqueo,” Report, July]. Gordon writes that the U.S. embargo has affected Cubans’ access…

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The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski…

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Percentage of Americans who have used ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft : 15 Who have never heard of them : 33 Amount the Saudi government has announced it will invest in Uber : $3,500,000,000…

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By Renee Gladman, from Calamities, a collection of linked essays that was published this month by Wave Books. Gladman is the author of eight works of prose, including the novel…

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By Peter Gizzi, from Archeophonics, which was published this month by Wesleyan University Press. Gizzi is the author of seven collections of poetry.

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From testimony given at a grand-jury hearing last year by Sonja Farak, a former chemist at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory, in Amherst. In 2014, Farak pleaded guilty to tampering…

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From a patient guide to the AspireAssist, a weight-loss device that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June.

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From a list of reference books published worldwide since 1793, compiled by Jack Lynch, a professor at Rutgers University, Newark. Lynch’s most recent book, You Could Look It Up, was…

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By Éric Chevillard, from Music & Literature No. 8. Chevillard is the author of numerous novels, including Prehistoric Times, which appeared in English in 2012. Translated from the French by…

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From a conversation between André Gomez and René Magritte, a Surrealist painter. The interview was conducted in Paris in 1948 for the Radio Suisse Romande and collected in René Magritte:…

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By Jen George, from “Instruction,” which appears in The Babysitter at Rest, a collection of her short fiction that will be published next month by Dorothy.

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By Marcel Proust (1871–1922), from an essay included in Chardin and Rembrandt, which will be published next month by David Zwirner Books as part of a new series featuring exemplary…

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From The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a fourteenth-century encyclopedia by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, an Egyptian scholar. The book was published this month by Penguin Classics. Translated from…

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Toward a post-Obama foreign policy

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Southern California homeowners vs. nature

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On the politics of nostalgia

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If we were writing for a prince with ready millions at command, we might take Lord Bacon’s estimate, and say that thirty acres are not too much for a prince-like…

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What became of the Christian intellectuals?

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Aiding and abetting the Saudi slaughter in Yemen

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Lee was the daughter of his mother’s hairdresser. Jim had been hearing about, but not really listening to, the saga of her troubles for what must have been a couple…

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It doesn’t matter that Ursula K. Le Guin has been winning awards for writing about aliens, wizards, and imaginary worlds since the 1960s — the label “science fiction” gives her…

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s authorial intrusions

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The meaning of the game

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Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism

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