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Archive: 2020

State of Exception

Lebanon’s cruel solution to the refugee crisis

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The Letter and Its Discontents

On July 7, we published on our website an open letter signed by more than one hundred and fifty prominent writers, artists, and scholars. “The free exchange of information and…

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A Game of Chance

Shirley Jackson’s devastating 1948 short story “The Lottery” takes place in what might be a provincial corner of America in which an annual, compulsory lottery lends a degree of adventure…

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No Time But the Present

From Breaking Bread with the Dead, which was published last month by Penguin Press. Navigating life in the internet age is a lot like doing battlefield triage. There are days…

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The Trouble with Angels

From Angels & Saints, which was published last month by New Directions. Surprisingly little was originally known about the angels. They are mentioned fewer than two hundred times in the…

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Motherboard Issues

From a conversation between Vladimir Alexeev, a data journalist, and GPT-3, a language generator developed by the artificial-intelligence laboratory OpenAI. GPT-3 learned to respond to questions by analyzing online data.…

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Not Throwing Away My Yacht

From The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, published this month by Archway Editions. The two-act play was written in response to the Broadway musical Hamilton, which Miranda composed based on a…

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Mortgage-backed Insecurities

From Having and Being Had, a book of non-fiction, which was published last month by Riverhead Books. Every year, financial advisers come to campus to meet with faculty, but I…

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Le Nozze

From Collected Stories, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “What did we say? Forty-nine by twenty-two?” He held the measuring rod open in his hands.…

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Save the Whales

From Fathoms: The World in the Whale, which was published in July by Simon and Schuster. Many international collecting institutions aim to feature a blue whale among their centerpieces. Suspended…

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Brute Force

From reports of weapons used by demonstrators and police officers in Portland, Oregon, where authorities have repeatedly used force to break up crowds protesting the police killing of George Floyd.…

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Hawthorne

From Willamette, a poetry collection, which is forthcoming from Knopf. Vertical lift in the Oregon Sunshine Makes for a perennial Escape route Black walnut trees are memory and skid They…

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B-Sighs

From “12 Sides,” an essay published in the Summer 2020 issue of Maggot Brain, a magazine published by Third Man Records. It also appeared in Sante’s collection Maybe the People…

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Findings

“Orange Pushy,” “Landscape,” and “Threesome,” photographs by Erin O’Keefe© The artist. Courtesy Denny Dimin Gallery, New York City Americans who are old, white, uneducated, unemployed, and live in someone else’s…

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New Books

A self-portrait by Francisco Goya, 1810 © akg-images/Nimatallah The best-known works of the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya do not give the impression of having been created by a particularly…

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The Well-Tempered Synthesizer

Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres

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Le Mot Juste

The soothing clarity of Shirley Hazzard

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I Imitate You

1960s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string—Like a book of life I’m in the kitchen with my killer Picking all the teeth out of a mouth harp Cigarette-ing…

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Life During Wartime

Learning to Go to Sea on Shore, by George Wright. Originally published in the November 1918 issue of Harper’s Magazine It is a small hotel compared with the fashionable resorts…

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On Defense

Twenty-five years of fighting mass incarceration in court

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Reason Not the Need

Self-storage and the dream of infinite space

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If I’m to Go

How to fight a deportation

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America’s Game

The reprise and demise of the XFL

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Perfect Storm

When is it time to abandon a place to climate change?

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The Sanctuary

Life in a cop-free zone

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November 2020

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