John Ashbery’s last poem, handwritten at his home in Hudson, New York, on August 25, 2017. Ashbery died on September 3.

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From descriptions listed on cards included in Arranged!, a board game developed by Nashra Balagamwala, a Pakistani designer, and released in May in the United States. Game play consists of…

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On any given day last summer, the smoke-choked skies over Missoula, Montana, swarmed with an average of twenty-eight helicopters and eighteen fixed-wing craft, a blitz waged against Lolo Peak, Rice…

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The pinhal interior, a wooded region of hills and narrow hollows in rural central Portugal, used to be farmland. Well into the latter half of the past century, the fields…

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Climate change comes to the cradle of civilization

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The first thing we did was build a bridge over Slough Creek, a pristine trout stream in the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park. I felt strange—digging and hammering in…

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The increasingly direct road to ruin

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Mr. Hutchinson took his pipe out of his mouth. “Got a new dog, I see.” He was wearing his buff-colored work suit, which he wore every day because, he said,…

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Discussed in this essay:  Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus. Knopf. 288 pages. $26.95. A Girl’s Guide to Missiles: Growing up in America’s Secret Desert by Karen Piper. 336 pages. Viking. $27.…

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Nick Drnaso’s hypnotically grim graphic novels

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Why the criminal justice system is ill-equipped to prosecute rape charges

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If it seems as though the world’s on fire, that’s because it is. Wildfires are starting earlier in the dry season and burning for longer. As of October 2017, European…

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Polarized political partisans are impatient not with their opponents’ views but with all politics; political consensus between parents and children has been rising since the Sixties; liberals are more likely…

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All of us at Harper’s Magazine deeply mourn the death of our longtime friend and contributing editor Tom Wolfe (1930–2018). Some of his most influential writings were published in this…

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A  Norwegian dendrochronologist found that smoke used to hide a Nazi battleship caused pine trees to stop forming rings. Hans Asperger helped the Third Reich kill disabled children. Holocaust survivors…

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History haunts, but Alabama changes

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The ongoing abuses of Australia’s refugee policy

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Great Pains Elizabeth Royte’s report about a water crisis in rural Kansas reflects the reality that federal regulations place a disproportionate burden on small businesses and towns [“Drinking Problems,” Letter…

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It’s often forgotten that the idea of the political spectrum—of politics having a left and right—has a physical origin. It comes from the seating arrangements at the National Assembly of…

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Here’s a story about how machines learn. Say you are the US Army and you want to be able to locate enemy tanks in a forest. The tanks are painted…

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By Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, a collection of essays that was published in May by Ugly Duckling Presse. Boyer is a poet and essayist. She received…

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