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Articles

New Books

It doesn’t matter that Ursula K. Le Guin has been winning awards for writing about aliens, wizards, and imaginary worlds since the 1960s — the label “science fiction” gives her…

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The Man Who Loved Metaphors

Jonathan Safran Foer’s authorial intrusions

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Tennis Lessons

The meaning of the game

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In Short

Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism

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Findings

FMRI studies of white Americans watching white people and black people being poked by a needle and rubbed by an eraser confirmed the well-established differential empathic activation for race (DEAR…

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Letters

Viral Content Considering requests for compassionate use of experimental drugs remains one of the hardest, most complex tasks that any health-care company faces, as Helen Ouyang writes [“Hashtag Prescription,” Essay,…

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Harper’s Index

Estimated number of U.S. children responsible for the caretaking of a family member : 1,400,000 Estimated portion of antibiotics prescribed in the United States that are unnecessary : 3/10 Portion of Americans who favor…

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The New New Narcissism

By Kristin Dombek, from The Selfishness of Others, a monograph that was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dombek is the recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe award.

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Test Perp

From a questionnaire created by Northpointe, a company that develops software to determine the likelihood that a defendant in a criminal trial will break the law in the future. The…

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Atlas Aggregated

No social encounter delights me more than meeting a doctor at a cocktail party. In clinical settings, doctors tend to be guarded and aloof. Catch one with a whiskey in…

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Women Appearing as Presents

By Amanda Nadelberg, from a manuscript in progress. Nadelberg’s most recent collection of poetry, Songs from a Mountain, was published in May by Coffee House Press.

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Pet Seminary

By Joy Williams, from Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which was published last month by Tin House Books. Williams is the author of four previous short-story collections and four novels, including…

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Graveyard Shift

From work-related fatalities reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2014.

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Something About Eating

By Robert Walser (1878–1956), from Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories, a collection that will be published next month by NYRB Classics. Translated from the German by Tom Whalen.

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Leaves of Grassfed

From “Manly Health and Training, with Off-hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” an article published by Walt Whitman in 1858 under the pseudonym Mose Velsor. It was reprinted by the Walt…

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Cock and Ball Story

From Jay to Bee, a collection of letters by Janet Frame (1924–2004) to William Theophilus Brown, a painter, and published in May by Counterpoint. Frame was the author of thirteen…

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Lotion

By Simone White, from Of Being Dispersed, a collection of poetry that was published in May by Futurepoem Books. White’s previous collection is Unrest.

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The Origins of Speech

In the beginning was Chomsky

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Four in Verse

Many of John Ashbery’s recent poems are full of sayings and parables and clichés — but from what culture, what country? The world of these poems resembles ours: there are…

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A Sigh and a Salute

An appreciation of Si Lewen and his Parade

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September 2016

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