It’s rare, in economics as in life, to get a second chance. Though economists are constantly learning lessons from past mistakes, seldom are there obvious opportunities to apply them. The…
Estimated number of Americans who have top-secret security clearance : 1,400,000 Average annual cost of detaining an inmate at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay : $900,000 At a supermax prison in the United…
By Mark Kingwell, from a keynote speech delivered in May at the annual meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada and published in the Ottawa Citizen. Kingwell is a professor…
From comments included in a petition addressed to the artist Kenneth Goldsmith, the website UbuWeb, and LABOR gallery in Mexico City, who in May jointly issued a call for volunteers…
From a complaint filed against several bloggers by John Steele, an Illinois attorney whose firm, Prenda Law, claims its mission is to fight copyright piracy. According to court documents, Prenda…
By Gretchen Marquette, published in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Marquette lives and works in Minneapolis.
By Vaishali Raode, from Mi Hijra, Mi Lakshmi (“I Am a Hijra, I Am Lakshmi”), an account of the life of Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi, a transgender-rights activist in the Indian…
Suppose we decide to take a look at the Sixties from a fresh perspective. Suppose we start not with politicians, or soldiers in Vietnam, or civil rights protesters, or Woodstock…
From “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” by S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, Rebecca Roache, published last year in Ethics, Policy & Environment. A widely cited report by the United Nations…
From Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica, published last year by Oxford University Press. An encyclopedic treatment of oneiromancy, or prophecy through dream interpretation, the five books were written in the second to early…
By László Krasznahorkai, from Seiobo There Below, published last month by New Directions. Krasznahorkai was born in Hungary in 1954. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. He already knew…
I am a sleep hunter. I track sleep through my house. I track it with a flashlight, and a bottle of pills, and two pillows, and a blanket, and a…
At first I dreaded having to investigate the history of sleep. Human slumber appeared impervious to time and place, stubbornly immune to the element of change animating most works of…
Whereas child bed wetters in sixteenth-century England had been directed for their malady to consume the testicles of a hedgehog or the windpipe of a cock, Enlightenment science, which rejected…
As a holistic nutritionist, I often work with people who have trouble sleeping. Some wake throughout the night; others jolt up at two a.m. and are unable to return to…
In the beginning, waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit, I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. With the…
She bowed and introduced herself as Yukiko and I knew it was her real name. I’d heard about the games played by the women in Tokyo’s hostess bars, that they…