If there has ever been a historical moment apt to foster optimism of the intellect, right now would not appear to be it. So it’s heartening to see how much…

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Lore Segal reinvents the immigrant novel

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On Abbas Kiarostami

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A new climate model that extensively cross-references atmospheric modeling with sedimentary records indicates that surface temperatures never exceeded modern preindustrial levels by more than 2º C in the past 2.6 million…

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Sport for Joe Andrew Cockburn’s portrayal of Joe Biden’s legislative career was seriously distorted [“No Joe!,” Letter from Washington, March]. As Biden’s European policy adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations…

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Factor by which the North Korean government’s hackers work more quickly than the Chinese government’s : 2 By which the Russian government’s work more quickly than the North Korean government’s…

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From Necropolis, which will be published this month by Columbia University Press. In the book, Khodasevich (1886–1939), a Russian poet, profiles Symbolists who lived in Russia in the early twentieth…

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From behaviors for which local, state, and federal politicians in the United States have, in the past year, publicly apologized. Posing with a Confederate flagDressing up as a Confederate soldierClaiming…

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In October 1939, C. S. Lewis delivered a sermon at Oxford’s University Church, later published under the title “Learning in War-Time.” World War II had been under way for just a…

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From Optic Nerve, a novel that was published last month by Catapult. Gainza has worked as a correspondent for the New York Times in Argentina. Translated from the Spanish by…

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From a lecture on education delivered to a group of Castleton University students and faculty by Adam Taylor, the superintendent of Rutland City Public Schools in Vermont. The talk was…

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From “The ‘Noble Indian’: A Godsend for the Extreme Right,” published in Le Monde last July. Translated from the French by John Cullen. Sitting Bull was a Sioux chief who…

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“Emily in the Greenhouse,” a photograph by Cig Harvey, whose work was on view last month at The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD, in New York City. Courtesy the artist…

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The Empire, a painting by Enrique Martínez Celaya, from Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, published last month by D.A.P. © The artist…

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From descriptions of actions perpetrated by professors Todd Heatherton, William Kelley, and Paul Whalen in Dartmouth’s department of psychology and brain sciences, as alleged in a lawsuit filed against the…

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For Nicole Eisenman, from A Sand Book, which will be published next month by Tin House. I was on my kneesHacking my brainsAlone in a bone Of unratified lightSomeone downstairsWas…

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Brainheart, a painting by Elliott Green, whose work was on view in February at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, in New Orleans. Courtesy the artist and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans…

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Mental Object 7, a mixed-media artwork by Alice Quaresma, whose work was on view last September at Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, in New York City. Courtesy the artist and the Tappan…

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Clockwise from top left: Moss and Ferns, Grass and Moss, Holes, and Leaves and Vines, paintings by Claire Sherman, whose work was on view last month at DC Moore Gallery,…

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Politics, power, and the Green New Deal

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The idea for the Civilian Conservation Corps sprang into action almost overnight, in March 1933, during the magnificent ferment of the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It became…

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How the United States helped spoil a plan to end gang violence in El Salvador

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A vandalized painting and the legacy of Ivan the Terrible

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Poverty and paradise at the edge of America

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Discussed in this essay: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Penguin Press. 320 pages. $30. Humour, by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press.…

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“Thank you for the honor. I am very—honored.” You have been instructed to remove the clumsy black mortarboard at this point in the commencement ceremony. Now you incline your head…

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Did climate change create modern civilization?

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