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Articles

Letters

All’s Well That Ends Wells In his report on the fracking boom in North Dakota [“Bakken Business,” Letter from Elkhorn Ranch, March], Richard Manning fails to mention the rapid falloff…

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Power Rangers

What, then, is the Washingtonian, this smug and satisfied man? Behold him as he ambles toward you on the sidewalks of Capitol Hill, phone clamped to his ear, talking loudly…

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The Age of Cruelty

Following heavy Democratic losses in the 2010 congressional elections, Barack Obama announced that he was reading a biography of Ronald Reagan to see how the great man had handled his…

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Harper’s Index

Chance that a U.S. combat pilot suffers from a mental-health problem : 1 in 17 That a remote drone pilot does : 1 in 12 Estimated percentage change since 2007 in the number of…

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Fei Fei

By Liao Yiwu, from For a Song and a Hundred Songs, out next month from New Harvest. Liao, who was born in China in 1958, spent four years in prison…

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Grace and the Chilcot Inquiry

By Nick Laird, from Go Giants, to be published in September by W. W. Norton. Laird is the author, most recently, of the novel Glover’s Mistake.

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The Elements of Guile

From more than 3,000 terms used in emails between employees engaged in corporate wrongdoing, collected from fraud investigations since 2009 and used by the accounting firm Ernst & Young in…

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Too Big to Jail

From the transcript of a March 7 Senate Banking Committee hearing on enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which requires U.S. financial institutions to help the federal government…

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Final Jeopardy

From more than 200 questions posed by jurors over two days in March during the trial of Jodi Arias. Arias, who stands accused of the 2008 murder of her former…

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Case Study (c. 1904)

By Joshua Cohen, from Attention! A (Short) History, published this month in the United Kingdom by Notting Hill Editions. Cohen, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most…

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Coop de Grâce

From an exchange last summer between Jean-Pierre Decool, a member of the French National Assembly, and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Translated from the French by Jess Cotton. question Jean-Pierre…

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Poetic License

From correspondence recently received and sent by members of Washington State’s Personalized License Plate Review Committee. shgnwgn — We feel that this plate could be offensive to good taste and…

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The Gift

By Mary Ruefle, from Issue 2 of Unstuck. Ruefle is the author of several books, including, most recently, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. The day the living room flooded…

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This Is Not My Beautiful House

From a February 4 complaint by the U.S. Department of Justice against the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s, charging that S&P fraudulently inflated ratings on residential-mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized…

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The Way of All Flesh

Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse

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Light, Sweet, Crude

A former U.S. ambassador peddles influence in Afghanistan

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Jingo Unchained

Mexican wrestling's all-American villain

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An Uncommon Pain

Living with the mystery of headache

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Our Town

How Roger Barker made Oskaloosa, Kansas, his laboratory

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Loyalty

As much as I love her, I blame Astrid. Astrid told my wife, Corinne, that she could achieve happiness if only she’d leave me. It sounded simple. “Leave that guy,…

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New Books

In 1929, Robert Ripley was receiving nearly 3,000 letters a day. As Neal Thompson writes in A Curious Man: The Strange & Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe it or Not!”…

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Making a Scene

Willa Cather’s correspondence

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June 2013

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