My first years in America

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How Wall Street enabled a global financial scandal

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The child is scared. Shrieking. She cannot get down. The child is four, in a whorl of terror. The mother is livid. Screaming. She thinks the child is weak, girly,…

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Discussed in this essay: Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris; Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses; Elizabeth DiSavino’s Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector; Percival Everett’s Telephone over chess.…

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Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

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On Jacques Tati

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Astronomers recorded, in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, the largest known post–Big Bang explosion, which lasted several hundred million years and created a void of fifteen galactic widths in the plasma…

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Radical Pique William Howe was not a “total radical,” as Thomas Meaney quotes me as saying in his report from last summer’s National Conservatism Conference [“Trumpism After Trump,” Report, February].…

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I  landed in Lisbon late on a temperate Thursday in January. This was the end of an unusually pan-European week for me. I’d spent the previous two days in a…

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From Afropessimism, which will be published this month by Liveright. In February 2001, I attended the Race Rave conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with my wife, Alice.…

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From The Celestial Hunter, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Italian. In the time of the Great Raven even the invisible was…

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From purposes of phone calls made by New York City residents to 3-1-1, a help line for information and non-emergency government services.  To discuss a neighbor who hangs underwear out…

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From Synthesizing Gravity, a collection of essays, which will be published this month by Grove Press. It is easy to be sentimental about memory because of its powers to intensify.…

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From My Meteorite, which was published last month by Penguin Books. Dodge is a sculptor and video artist. I always knew I was adopted, and since I was born in…

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From “A Short Lexicon of Milan Kundera,” an essay published in Revue des deux mondes in March to mark Kundera’s ninetieth birthday. Noiville is a novelist and a staff writer…

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From Genghis Chan on Drums, which will be published next year by Omnidawn. I don’t imagine that a chariot is hurrying near but that a sleek car is speeding up…

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From The Last Taxi Driver. The novel, which tells the story of a cab company in Northern Mississippi, was published last month by Tin House Books. They never tell you…

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From Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer, a collection of interviews he conducted with convicted murderer Ricardo Melogno, which will be published in June by Catapult. In 1982, at the…

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From a list of terms defined by the U.S. Department of Defense in a report on men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels. Elliot Rodger was a twenty-­two-year-old self-described…

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Why the left should arm itself

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The genuine sportsman’s voice is seldom heard in the outcry against gun-control laws. The dominant note is the shrill voice of the superpatriot. His sentiments were once well synthesized by…

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The unfulfilled promise of American citizenship

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Among the child police of Chhattisgarh

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Is Trump right about the Fed?

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Searching for paradise in Ethiopia’s rock churches

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Miranda was tall and as dark-haired as they come. I say was and not is and that is inaccurate because she is still around and I really am not. She…

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Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at an annual gathering, 1928 Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Last summer, Philadelphia proclaimed…

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