In his classic book On Liberty, the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill urged that man strive to become “a progressive being.” Mill defined progressivism as the cultivation of individuality;…
Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University,…
By John Crowley, from a lecture delivered in June at MoMA PS1 as part of Triple Canopy’s Speculations (“The future is ”) series. Crowley’s article “Madame and the Masters” appeared…
By Jonathan Littell, from The Fata Morgana Books, to be published this month by Two Lines Press. Littell is the author of several books, including The Kindly Ones. Translated from…
From a transcript of a meeting held on August 6 by the town council of Deer Trail, Colorado. On July 2, Phillip Steel, a local resident, proposed an ordinance to…
From a June 2013 blog post by Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor at the University of Miami who resigned last December after he was accused of failing to disclose a…
From Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism, by Jennifer Percy, to be published in January by Scribner. The book is an account of the two summers Percy spent reporting on a…
Date on which John Kerry called the crisis in Syria “our Munich moment” : 9/7/2013 On which Lyndon Johnson said that what “we learned . . . at Munich” committed us to intervention in Vietnam : 7/28/1965…
By Dan Chiasson, from Bicentennial: Poems, to be published next year by Knopf. Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College. Little bird, little sugar cube, Tell me all the state secrets Of…
From standard operating procedures for force-feeding prisoners at the U.S. military’s detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Al Jazeera released a recently updated version of the document in May, as 103…
From titles to 160 romance novels by Barbara Cartland. Unpublished at the time of her death, in 2000, they are currently being released on BarbaraCartland.com as the The Pink Collection.…
When I began my tenure as publisher of Harper’s Magazine nearly thirty years ago, my biggest challenge — or so I thought at the time — was to get advertising…
To the long list of American institutions that have withered since the dawn of the 1980s—?journalism, organized labor, mainline Protestantism, small-town merchants—?it may be time to add another: college-level humanities.…
This spring, Newark mayor Cory Booker, then considering a run for U.S. Senate, came to my office along with members of his staff to discuss national economic issues. We spent…
Rank of “Jesus” and “Mohammed,” respectively, among the Wikipedia articles with the most editorial changes : 8,3 Rank of “George W. Bush” : 1 Projected height, in feet, of a Saudi skyscraper, financed by…
By Laurent Beccaria and Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, from an essay included as an insert in the Winter 2013 issue of the French quarterly XXI. Beccaria is the publisher of the…