If I’m having trouble sleeping and feel like spinning my wheels in the dark, I like to meditate on the simulation hypothesis—the idea that we’re living inside a kind of…

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Estimated number of Nigerians killed in clashes between herders and farmers over the first six months of 2018 : 1,300 In fighting with Boko Haram : 217 Factor by which…

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From Black Is the Body, which will be published in February by Knopf. Bernard is a professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont,…

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From complaint letters addressed to the New York Philharmonic and subsequent responses, stored in the orchestra’s archive. The letters are dated from 1952–1953. Dimitri Mitropoulos was the music director of…

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From To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, which was published in September by Wave Books. Hayes’s…

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From descriptions of writers included in FBI surveillance reports. The files were published this year by MIT Press. The collection, Writers Under Surveillance, was edited by JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton,…

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From explanations given by priests as to why sexual abuse was acceptable, as described in Pennsylvania’s “Fortieth Statewide Investigating Grand Jury Report.” The report, which was released in August, examines…

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From a manuscript in progress that will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020. Those years when I was alive, I lived the era of the fast car. There…

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“Mistral-sculpted Snow, Mont Ventoux,” a photograph by Rachel Cobb, whose monograph Mistral: The Legendary Wind of Provence was published last month by Damiani. Cobb’s work is on view this month…

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Reitscape, a mixed-media artwork by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose work is on view this month at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. © The artist. Courtesy James Cohan…

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Big Bend Border Bloom, a painting by Rosson Crow, whose work was on view last year at Honor Fraser Gallery, in Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery,…

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Untitled XXIII and Untitled XXVII, paintings by Merikokeb Berhanu, whose work was on view in September at FNB Joburg Art Fair, in Johannesburg. Courtesy the artist and Addis Fine Art…

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Ethereal Desire, a mixed-media artwork by YoAhn Han, whose work was on view in August at Chase Young Gallery, in Boston. Courtesy the artist and Chase Young Gallery, Boston.

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The plight of Christians in an age of intolerance

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On the burden of the black public intellectual

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I can remember as a child sitting upstairs in my bedroom and hearing my mother shout at the top of her voice that someone “colored . . . colored!” was on the…

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Inside New York City’s task force on bias

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Toward an ethical archive of the web

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A contemplation of my parents’ marriage

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I had finished lunch when I decided to attend the memorial service later that afternoon for Juno Wasserman, who had died the week before, just shy of seventy. Juno had been…

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At dinner in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 1976, the writer Armistead Maupin urged Rock Hudson, the twentieth century’s most famously closeted heartthrob, to come out by writing a book. Hudson’s…

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Orson Welles sets the record straight

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Mary Robison’s fiction of the superfluous

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Political scientists concluded that the sharing of hostile political rumors is not motivated by partisanship and is typically practiced by status-hungry, socially marginalized groups who rank high in a “Need…

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Ahundred years ago this month, the First World War shuddered to a close. The end came when the armistice took effect on the Western Front at 11 am on November…

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From Professor at Large, which was published last month by Cornell University Press. It must have seemed some kind of risk to request a sermon from a man once so…

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From behaviors alleged at trial to have been committed by a unit of Baltimore police officers in the line of duty. The officers were convicted this year of robbery and…

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