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Articles

Scotched Efforts

From entries on Wikipedia written by the user AmaryllisGardener. AmaryllisGardener, a nineteen-year-old from North Carolina, has written more than twenty-three thousand articles for Scots Wikipedia but cannot speak Scots, a…

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Christmas in Cochinchina

From the anthology A Very German Christmas: The Greatest Austrian, Swiss and German Holiday Stories of All Time, which was published in September by New Vessel Press. Translated from the…

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Parental Guidance Suggested

From a speech delivered in September to the Boca Raton School Board, in Florida, by an elementary school teacher concerned about the behavior of parents during their children’s remote-learning classes.…

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Penelope Waits for Odysseus

From a manuscript in progress. I never doubted you’d return. You’re a man of your word And this is your kingdom. But recently I’ve feared you’d find me Looking like…

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New Books

“Modena, 1973,” by Luigi Ghirri, from The Map and the Territory, which was published in 2018 by MACK © The artist. Courtesy MACK It has been oddly comforting these past…

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Findings

I See You and Holly Coming Home, by Rebecca Ness © The artist. Courtesy Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles The unusually cold, rainy autumns of 1917 and 1918 discouraged mallards…

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Two Poems

think back Say an idea is math without numbers. For instance, you could say that an idea distorts consciousness as a massive object distorts space. Such distortion is sometimes known…

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Thing of Ether

Chasing the aurora borealis

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A Perfect Woman

It would be a bold writer who would attempt to have the last word on the much-­debated maternal instinct. But since so many men have had their say on the…

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The Silenced Majority

Can America still afford democracy?

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Drawing From Life

Called out of retirement. Already onto other things. Netflix, Roku haiku, one patient Basho letter at a time. Onto berating the orange sun god, with his changeable guard of hagiographers…

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“If Only I Could Begin Again!”

The mystery of a writer’s métier

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Skin in the Game

Wall Street’s answer to the student-debt crisis

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False Labor

Giving up on motherhood

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The New New Testament

From an account of John 8:3–11 in a law-and-ethics textbook published by the Chinese Communist Party. In the Gospel, a group of Pharisees have gathered to stone a woman accused…

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Abstract Expression

The former Yugoslavia’s enigmatic memorial architecture

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Letters

Bitter Pill Naomi Jackson’s essay [“A Litany for Survival,” Memoir, September] humanizes the disconcerting but clear evidence of health disparities based on race. These statistics, established in the medical literature…

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You Say You Want a Revolution

Morality is often reduced to choices, and imperfect choices at that. This is the human condition; to accept it and do the best we can is a brave thing, and…

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Ad Nauseam

From Subprime Attention Crisis, published last month by FSGO x Logic. Though we’ve mostly forgotten this now, the idea that the internet would give rise to some of the largest…

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Deep Space 19

From “Origin of new emergent Coronavirus and Candida fungal diseases—Terrestrial or cosmic?,” which was published in July by Advances in Genetics. Claims that certain pathogens have extraterrestrial origins have been…

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Bleat House

From A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, which was published in September by PublicAffairs. When Chris Weathersbee, then in his sixties, moved onto the property in Corinth, Vermont, in 1999,…

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Blue Lives Batter

From descriptions of police violence filmed in the United States between May 29 and June 7. Compiled by ProPublica. A protester holds up her phone. The officer pepper-sprays her twice,…

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Whine On You Crazy Diamond

From remarks made in July by Russ Diamond, a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. I feel that I must personally respond to the incidents of hate and intolerance…

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Garden-Variety Racism

From the dissenting opinion of the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, issued in July in response to the court’s decision to decline to review the case of Fair…

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December 2020

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