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Corn Bred Richard Manning’s critiques of Iowa politics [“The Trouble with Iowa,” Report, February] are all too familiar to those of us who live in the state, and many of…

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Portion of calls to the IRS help line that went unanswered during last year’s tax-filing season : 3/5 Percentage of middle-aged, college-educated white Americans who are millionaires : 22 Of middle-aged, college-educated black Americans : 6…

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Dialogue

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Poem

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From nicknames given to participants on Let Me In, a South Korean reality-television show, in which a panel of beauty experts approves contestants for a plastic-surgery makeover. The nicknames describe…

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From a mailing sent out by Eileen Myles in October 1992 as part of a presidential campaign in which she ran as an “openly female” write-in candidate. Myles is a…

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By Sophie Calle, a French conceptual artist, from an interview with Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio One that was published in the Winter 2016 issue of Brick. Her work Pas…

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From oral evidence given in 2013 by Mark Kennedy, a former undercover British police officer, to the British Home Affairs Committee. Between 2003 and 2010, Kennedy used a fake identity,…

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Like campaigning politicians, pornographers — who are also in the business of galvanizing tired nervous systems — face one problem that never goes away: cutting through the numbness caused by…

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By Dorthe Nors, from an unpublished collection of short stories. Nors is the author of four novels and one previous story collection. A volume of her novellas, So Much for…

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From How to Grow Old, by Marcus Tullius Cicero. The work was written in 44 b.c. and was published in a new edition this month by Princeton University Press. Translated…

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From “The Case of Moulay Ismael — Fact or Fancy?” an Austrian study coauthored by Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer and published in Plos One.

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How to win the war on drugs

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In 1930 we went to live in Sweden. Before we had unpacked, and while I was still in that baffled mood that always comes on me when forced to tackle…

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Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan

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The making and unmaking of a half-billion-dollar treasure hunt

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Your lawsuits are good for America

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Television, turnout, and the election-industrial complex

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The legend of the Watts Towers

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I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver’s I.D. and immediately began to…

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Halfway through David Means’s brilliant new novel, HYSTOPIA (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) — a careening metafiction that hallucinates a post-Vietnam America governed by a third-term JFK in which gangs…

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“If we want to know what American normality is — i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal — we can trust television,” David Foster Wallace once wrote. Can we?…

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