That the Republican Party has worked its way to a lonely and unpopular place is not news. The G.O.P.’s congressional wing has been moving rightward since the 1980s, and in…
For as long as there have been machines, there have been worries about their power to destroy jobs. The Luddites — early-nineteenth-century artisans who bitterly resisted the new textile machinery…
Percentage change since 2007 in the number of cells in the New York City prison system devoted to solitary confinement : +63 Portion of the adolescent prisoners in solitary on Rikers Island…
By Amitava Kumar, from A Matter of Rats, a “short biography” of his hometown of Patna, India, to be published by Duke University Press in April. Patna is the capital…
From insults reportedly made to French presidents, collected in De voyou à pov’ con, by Raphaël Meltz, published in 2012 by Robert Laffont. (See page 38 for an Annotation on…
From a 1933 diary entry by George Kennan (1904–2005), with the heading “January, Riga.” Kennan was working for the State Department at the time, in a diplomatic post in Latvia.…
From additions to Wikipedia entries on women with significant achievements in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, made by volunteers during an event hosted by Brown University last October. An estimated…
From “Divine Secrets of the RYBAT Sisterhood: Four Senior Women of the Directorate of Operations Discuss Their Careers,” the transcript of a recently declassified 2004 conversation among five high-ranking female…
“How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” by Lydia Davis, from a collection of stories to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux…
By Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011), from The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, to be published in March by New York Review Books. Edited by Colin Thubron…
From a decision by the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand in the case of Ioane Teitiota, who because of rising sea levels fled his home country of Kiribati,…
It was in 1988 that I moved to the bedraggled neighborhood of Hyde Park in order to study American history at the University of Chicago. I left the city ten…