Now he’s watching scarves of cloud slide over the plane’s steel wing. Surely it’s real, this swirl of light. But the visions that confront him do not enter his life.…

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Lessons from a nuclear life

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Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and…

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A revisionist view of the drug wars

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See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

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Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite.…

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At stake was more than some Caribbean island. America itself, one elder statesman informed the president, faced a crucial test “in the great struggle between liberty and despotism.” Would the…

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In the fall of 2014 I began attending hearings, some of them banal and procedural, others more emotional, for a Los Angeles murder trial that was cranking its way through…

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On the dangers of American hubris

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Photographs by Lisa Elmaleh for Harper’s Magazine © The artist I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched…

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To be titled, a painting by Marc Padeu, whose work was on view in April at Peres Projects, in Milan, Italy. Courtesy the artist and Peres Projects Five-year-olds will believe…

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A “Native American Church” without Native Americans

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The underrated art of not getting gored

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Foul Is Fair Kyle Paoletta’s article [“The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday,” Criticism, April] tracks the shifting rhetoric of climate reporting in recent years from extreme pessimism to timid optimism. Is either…

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From Animal Spirits, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Soon after he graduated in 1909, Aldo Leopold headed to the Southwest to take a job…

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From August Blue, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vass decided to sail after all. He said the wind would calm down. The boat was…

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From a symposium on the topic of loss, which was published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Threepenny Review. The cult of loss has many enthusiastic members. And as…

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From Lament for Julia, which will be published this month by New York Review Books. I did not love her at first; not for a long time. She did not…

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From similes used in twentieth-century noir books and films, compiled in The Mysterious Romance of Murder, which was published last May by Cornell University Press. Impressive as an adoring moll…

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From the minutes of a meeting of the Boca Raton Planning and Zoning Board held on March 2. ashley cream: Good evening. I am here as a concerned citizen and…

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From a list of queries and complaints received by the New York City 311 line since 2003, released in March to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. Can you check if my…

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From Phantom Pain Wings, which was published last month by New Directions. Translated from the Korean. I don’t walk without music I don’t wear a slip without lace There’s a…

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Human Lock, by Vojtěch Kovařík. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, Brussels, New York City The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos (New Directions, $25.95), refers…

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On Chuck Berry

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See the solution to last month’s puzzle.

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From the witness testimony of NCIS special agent John C. Little, given in North Carolina in August 2021 during the detention hearing of Joseph Maurino, a New Jersey national guardsman…

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A personal history of anxiety

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“Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today,” a voice-over invites near the beginning of Design for Dreaming, a General Motors promotional film from 1956.…

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