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Articles

What Came Before the Big Bang?

The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the universe

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Our Truly Dreadful Situation

Why is the Universe as it is and not something else? Why is the Universe here at all? It is true that at present we have no clue to the…

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A Special Relationship

The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

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When I Die

An end-of-life doctor faces his own end

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The Lottery

The false promises of foreign-labor recruiters

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The Charmer

Louis Farrakhan and the Black Lives Matter protests

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The Ultimate Terrorist Factory

Are French prisons incubating extremism?

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To Laugh That We May Not Weep

A nearly forgotten cartoonist we need to look at — right now!

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“We’ve Only Just Begun”

They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It…

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New Books

The night before Aeneas set sail from Carthage, Dido, riven with despair, love, and rage, lay awake, set on her own death. Not so the Trojan. He slept easily aboard…

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New Movies

When Marnie Was There (2014), an animated feature by the Japanese director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, tells the story of a twelve-year-old girl who befriends the ghost of her grandmother, Marnie, at the…

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Same Mistakes

Ted Hughes’s evasions

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House of Cards

An error in the January 2016 puzzle diagram affected three answers: as indicated in the clues, 26D should be seven spaces long, 43A should be ten spaces long, and 44A…

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Findings

It was determined that nine of ten Canadians who kill their minor stepchildren are men, that the U.S. health-care system is not equipped to address the needs of pregnant men,…

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Letters

Harper’s v. Harper It is a tradition among Canadian pundits to travel abroad bearing tales — possibly because it is easier to convince a foreign audience that the current government, regardless…

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Harper’s Index

Average age, in years, of the thirty most frequently played holiday songs : 61 Year when the youngest of these songs, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” was released : 1994…

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Power in Paris

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents? That is what’s supposed to happen in France this…

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Invisible City

By Justin E. H. Smith, from a work in progress. Smith’s fourth book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton), will be published in June. At the end of August, the oldest…

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Thanks, Obama

From entries made since 2009 to the U.S. Protocol Gift Unit Federal Register Report, which records items given by foreign dignitaries to federal employees.

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Pain Quotidien

From a list of approximately 70,000 diagnostic codes included in the International Classification of Diseases, Clinical Modification, which was adopted by U.S. health-care providers in October.

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Shit Talkers

From an audio recording entered as evidence in a 2014 lawsuit filed by a man identified as D.B., who claims that he inadvertently recorded his colonoscopy on his cell phone.…

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Seminal Theories

From Of Beards and Men, by Christopher Oldstone-Moore, which will be published next month by the University of Chicago Press. Oldstone-Moore is a senior lecturer in history at Wright State…

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Naked Ambition

From a contract prepared by a casting agency for extras in the television show Westworld, which is scheduled to air on HBO next year.

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Road to Nowhere

By László Krasznahorkai, from Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a travel memoir that will be published next month by Seagull Books. Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.…

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January 2016

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