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Articles

New Books

A motley crew steers Anne Carson’s FLOAT (Knopf, $30). There’s Edmund Husserl, Jean-Luc Godard, Joan of Arc, Pablo Picasso, mad Hölderlin, Hegel, a chorus of Gertrude Steins, and Carson’s noble,…

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Are You Kidding?

The inscrutable sincerity of Nell Zink

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Supping on Horrors

Thomas De Quincey’s bad habits

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Findings

Vanuatu was struck by fatal diarrhea, lumpy skin disease debuted in Albania, camel pox broke out among Israeli and Palestinian dromedaries, and glanders was causing panic sales of studs across…

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Letters

Blame Game Joy Gordon perpetuates a number of untruths regarding the United States’ policy toward Cuba [“El Bloqueo,” Report, July]. Gordon writes that the U.S. embargo has affected Cubans’ access…

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Giantess

The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski…

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Harper’s Index

Percentage of Americans who have used ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft : 15 Who have never heard of them : 33 Amount the Saudi government has announced it will invest in Uber : $3,500,000,000…

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I Began the Day

By Renee Gladman, from Calamities, a collection of linked essays that was published this month by Wave Books. Gladman is the author of eight works of prose, including the novel…

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Archeophonics

By Peter Gizzi, from Archeophonics, which was published this month by Wesleyan University Press. Gizzi is the author of seven collections of poetry.

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Career High

From testimony given at a grand-jury hearing last year by Sonja Farak, a former chemist at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory, in Amherst. In 2014, Farak pleaded guilty to tampering…

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Aspirational Brand

From a patient guide to the AspireAssist, a weight-loss device that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June.

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The Key to All Anthologies

From a list of reference books published worldwide since 1793, compiled by Jack Lynch, a professor at Rutgers University, Newark. Lynch’s most recent book, You Could Look It Up, was…

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Theme & Violations

By Éric Chevillard, from Music & Literature No. 8. Chevillard is the author of numerous novels, including Prehistoric Times, which appeared in English in 2012. Translated from the French by…

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This is Not a Painter

From a conversation between André Gomez and René Magritte, a Surrealist painter. The interview was conducted in Paris in 1948 for the Radio Suisse Romande and collected in René Magritte:…

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Creative Licentious

By Jen George, from “Instruction,” which appears in The Babysitter at Rest, a collection of her short fiction that will be published next month by Dorothy.

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Old Master

By Marcel Proust (1871–1922), from an essay included in Chardin and Rembrandt, which will be published next month by David Zwirner Books as part of a new series featuring exemplary…

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Pro Tips

From The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, a fourteenth-century encyclopedia by Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, an Egyptian scholar. The book was published this month by Penguin Classics. Translated from…

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Land of Sod

Southern California homeowners vs. nature

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Tend Your Garden

If we were writing for a prince with ready millions at command, we might take Lord Bacon’s estimate, and say that thirty acres are not too much for a prince-like…

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The Watchmen

What became of the Christian intellectuals?

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October 2016

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