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Articles

Letters

Crimes Against Humanities Thomas Frank’s insightful lamentation about the demise of the humanities in higher education [“Course Corrections,” Easy Chair, October] notes the mammoth cost of attending college in the…

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I Can Say Many Nice Things

Fleming awoke in the dark and his room felt loose, sloshing so badly he gripped the bed. From his window there was nothing but a hallway, and if he craned…

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The Real Lost Generation

In late August, I traveled with colleagues from the Roosevelt Institute in New York to New Orleans, where we had invited a panel of community organizers to join us in…

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The View from 86

By Malcolm Cowley, from a December 20, 1984, letter to Peter Braestrup, editor of Wilson Quarterly. Best known for his literary criticism, Cowley died in 1989. The Long Voyage: Selected…

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Freeze!

From 2012 and 2013 blotters of the police department in Unalaska, Alaska, a town of 4,400 in the Aleutian Islands.

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Interview 8 (Mother)

By Jesse Ball, from his novel Silence Once Begun, out next month from Pantheon. Ball is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including, most recently, The Curfew.

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Flight

By Dorthe Nors, from Karate Chop, a short-story collection to be published in February by Graywolf in collaboration with A Public Space. Nors is the author of several works of…

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The Old Women and the Sea

From an interview conducted by Youngmi Mayer with Jung Won Oh, Ko Jun Ja, and Mun Yeon Ok, female divers on Korea’s Jeju Island, published in Lucky Peach: The Gender…

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I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind

By Siri Hustvedt, from a keynote lecture delivered in Paris at this year’s winter meeting of the Société de Neurophysiologie, to be published in a special issue of Clinical Neurophysiology,…

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American Scolder

From annotations written by John Stuart Mill on his personal copies of the first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, which were published in two volumes, in 1841 and 1844.…

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Cocoa Buff

From a passage dated December 30, 1668, in the journal of Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, discovered earlier this year by Kate Loveman and partially quoted in The Journal…

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Define Mysteries

From explanatory subtitles to entries in the U.S. edition of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, an eleven-volume, 7,216-page work compiled by more than 1,000 scholars over the past twenty-five years and…

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Thy Kingdom Plumb

From “Holy Springs and Holy Water: Underestimated Sources of Illness?” published last year in the Journal of Water and Health.

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Does Mailer Matter?

The Young Writer and the last literary celebrity

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Bewitched

A theory of glamour

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The Mercenary Position

Can Amazon change its predatory ways?

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New Books

Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make It New” has long been cited as modernism’s driving objective. Yet Pound, in coining the phrase, was actually drawing on his own (rather free) translation of…

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Loving Las Vegas

What the prudes get wrong about Sin City

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Lovely, Dark, Deep

Bread Loaf, Vermont August 18, 1951 Here was the first surprise: the great man was much heavier, his body much more solid, than I’d anticipated. You would not have called…

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At Death’s Door

The hope and hokum of immortality

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Showing a Little Leg

A pilgrimage to Ellen Altfest’s body paintings

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December 2013

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