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Articles

Harper’s Index

Percentage of all litter on U.S. roadways accounted for by cigarette butts : 36 Estimated additional hours Americans would spend stoned annually if marijuana were legal in most states : 30,000,000,000 Ounces of marijuana…

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50,000 Life Coaches Can’t Be Wrong

Inside the industry that’s making therapy obsolete

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Into Africa

By Howard W. French, from China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, published this month by Knopf. French is a former New York…

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Buried in Ruble

From a February 1952 letter sent by the film and theater director Elia Kazan to Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck rejected the proposal, calling it “original…

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Ag Gag

From approximately 150 interviews with current and former employees of the Food and Drug Administration collected as part of an oral-history project begun in the 1970s. Recordings of the interviews…

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Poisoner’s Dilemma

From transcripts of conversations on September 17, 2011, recorded by FBI informant Joe Sims, among members of a Georgia militia arrested the following month on various charges. Dan Roberts was sentenced…

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Automatic for the People

From an April 7, 2012, letter by Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle, to Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kalashnikov died in December 2013; the letter…

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Anna Maria

By Luciana Castellina, from Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini, out this month from Verso Books. Translated from the Italian by Patrick Camiller.

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Edible Complex

From a new translation of Herodotus’ The Histories, by Tom Holland, out this month from Viking.

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Green Old Party

By Ralph Nader, from Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, published last month by Nation Books.

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Operation Paper Clip

From a report by the Inspector General of the Air Force on allegations against Major General Stephen D. Schmidt, who retired in January after his behavior toward subordinates was found to…

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New Books

Last fall, the Man Booker Prize, the premier award for fiction in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, announced that it was coming to America. Presumably Edward St. Aubyn had already…

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Consume, Screw, Kill

The origins of today’s mass extinction

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Dark Heights

Photographs from the 2014 Sochi Olympics

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The There There

Once, when they were still a family and the boys were mostly grown yet still living at home, they were sitting, the four of them, at their customary seats at…

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Humor

Repetition is a mighty power in the domain of humor. I undertook to prove the truth of this forty years ago in San Francisco on the occasion of my second…

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Coup de Foudre

Mariama, you’ll never read this letter: if I sent it, our civil settlement would be invalidated and the district attorney would reopen the criminal case. I have no reason to…

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Razing Arizona

Will drought destroy the Southwest?

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Blue Sky Days

Two years ago, in February 2012, President Barack Obama signed into law the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which called on the Federal Aviation Administration to “provide for the safe…

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Harper’s Index

Percentage of black Americans in the South who are prevented from voting because they have been convicted of a felony : 13 Percentage of all criminal defendants in the United States who…

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Search and Destroy

Gutter punks throw bottles at the cops near Tompkins Square Park, a police cruiser is flipped upside down in Crown Heights, two men fight under the marquee of a Times…

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Diagnose This

How to be your own best doctor

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May 2014

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