The Latest

Zimbabwe re-elects Robert Mugabe, a fatwa against croissants, and a lemonade-stand robbery at BB-gunpoint

"0232," a photograph from Linda Fregni Nagler's series The Hidden Mother, which was featured in the Readings section of our August 2013 issue. All 997 daguerreotypes, tintypes, and albumen prints that comprise the series are currently on view in an exhibition curated by Cindy Sherman inside Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace) at the Venice Biennale. Because of the long exposure times required by early photography, children posing for portraits were often held still by adults hidden under blankets. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan/Zuoz, Switzerland

Ben Stroud on getting to know a character, the balance between research and imagination, and the writer’s desire for recognition

Please join us at McNally Jackson Books on Wednesday, July 31, at 7 p.m. for Sleeping With Harper’s Magazine: Authors in search of a good night’s rest.

How one community on the Sea of Cortez restored its fishery — and its economy — by stopping fishing altogether

Alexander Maksik on Charles Taylor’s Liberia, the oldest story in the world, and the trouble with elegant variation

How the mass killing of Islamists is being justified in America

Egypt teeters precariously, cat zombies and zonkeys live, and a hexapus dies

Mike Paterniti on the power of cheese, the pleasures of digression, and the War of the Roses method of book writing

Is it possible to simply disband the partisan FISA court?

The campaign to shut down a family oyster farm exposes an unflattering side of the American conservation movement

Wine and Catholicism among the Tibetans of China’s Yunnan Province

A film produced in conjunction with "Emptying the World's Aquarium" (Harper's, August 2013)

Reading James Kelly’s The Insider

We asked some of our favorite writers how they were sleeping. Their responses ranged from the personal, to the scientific, to the historical.

Detroit files for bankruptcy, prison breaks outside Baghdad, and snail-mucus makeup in France

What the United States can learn from the East German surveillance experience

On the problems with Democratic interventions

How Boeing’s adoption of defense-contracting practices led to the flawed Dreamliner 787

Glenn Greenwald on the importance of privacy, the hypocrisy of Democrats, and how he almost lost the NSA leak

Trayvon Martin’s killer is acquitted, Yasiin Bey is force fed, and Sweden gets disability-themed beer

How we sleep (or don’t), the decline of North American fisheries, and scent sense

Why has a secret court been permitted to place America at the center of a new global panopticon?

Sexual assault amid Egyptian upheaval, adult breast-feeding in China, and the empathy of taxidermist George Dante

A 1981 recording of a police officer and a burglar discussing the robbery and murder of a pioneering mycologist

Will the NSA’s surveillance program threaten the Atlantic Alliance?

The U.S. Supreme Court gets in on the Voting Rights and Defense of Marriage acts, Egypt threatens revolution, and a harsh Crimean punishment for borscht-dumping

Not in These Shoes, an enamel painting on aluminum by Marilyn Minter, whose work was featured in the Readings section of our July 2013 issue. An exhibition of her work was on view in May at Regen Projects, in Los Angeles. © The artist / Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Salon 94 Gallery, New York City

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein on Muriel Rukeyser’s political and emotional vision

And why we should talk more about it