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Articles

Harper’s Index

Number of workers paid to imitate langur cries to clear New Delhi of rhesus monkeys during President Obama’s January visit : 40 Estimated number of Indian surveillance agents assigned to the wife…

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The Joke

By Justin E. H. Smith, from “The Fundamentals of Gelastics,” a work in progress. Smith’s latest book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (Princeton), will be published in June. In…

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For the Longest Time

From entries in the India Book of Records, founded in 2004 by Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, who holds the Guinness world record for constructing the largest screwdriver.

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Poverty Level

From How to Get Rid of Homeless, a collection of forum posts compiled by Matteo Bittanti and published in January by Concrete Press, Bittanti’s publishing company. The posts, which were made on…

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Off Site

From online messages found on Ross Ulbricht’s laptop in 2013 by FBI agents. Ulbricht, then twenty-nine, was arrested while working on his computer in a San Francisco public library. In…

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Abolish High School

Ididn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States…

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Unread at Any Speed

By Ralph Nader, from Return to Sender, a collection of 115 unanswered letters Nader sent to George W. Bush and Barack Obama between 2000 and 2015, out this month from Seven Stories Press.

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Genre Friction

From a February order by a U.S. magistrate judge denying summary judgment in Latele Television, C.A. v. Telemundo Communications Group, LLC. The suit argues that El Rostro de AnalÍa, a telenovela produced by Telemundo, infringes on…

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Beat Reporter

From a previously unpublished journal entry by Allen Ginsberg, dated February 18–19, 1965, and collected in The Essential Ginsberg, which will be published next month by Harper Perennial. In 1965, Ginsberg accepted…

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Watched Words

From Internet search terms blocked by the Chinese government since 2011. The terms were compiled and translated by the China Digital Times, a bilingual Chinese-media-tracking site based in California.

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In the Pain Cavern

By Maggie Nelson, from The Argonauts, out next month from Graywolf. Nelson is the author of several books, including Bluets, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, and Jane: A Murder.

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Dire Straights

From questions asked by deputies of the L.A. County Men’s Jail to determine whether an inmate should be placed in a unit created to house and protect gay and transgender…

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A Floating Freehold

From “Voyage Alone in the Rob Roy,” which appeared in the May 1868 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay — along with the magazine’s entire 164-year archive — is available online at harpers.org/fromthearchive.

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Going It Alone

The dignity and challenge of solitude

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Rotten Ice

Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic

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Saving the Whale, Again

The catastrophic incompetence of Citigroup

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American Hustle

How elite youth basketball exploits African athletes

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New Books

Toni Morrison’s novels — a formidable shelf of eleven by now, as the author settles in to her mid-eighties — have all been catholicons, correctives to the canon. That strong, sensuous diction —…

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Company Men

Torture, treachery, and the CIA

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The Test of Time

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels of remembering

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Findings

Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who…

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April 2015

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