The Latest

Aria City, Kabul. The Aria City project covers 350 blocks, and includes businesses, residences, and social services.

A thwarted novelist’s tale

Timothy Donnelly on writing challenging verse, the cultural faith bred by 30 Rock, and the poet’s need to reach for the eternities

Philosopher Jerome Neu argues that our emotional responses can be trained

What Afghanistan’s political economy tells us about its future

West African extremists, Obama's gun challenge, and tragic Belgian twins

How Arena Football League players fare in the NFL

Christopher S. Stewart on his epic hunt for Honduras’s lost White City

Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz

“Where will it end, as Google becomes ever more dominant?”

The incoming treasury secretary's positions on regulation and the deficit offer cause for concern

Australian wildfires, Giant Peach arithmetic, and Russian zorb misadventures

On the life-drawings of an American literary master

A leading cyberactivist commits suicide at twenty-six. Was he hounded to death by federal prosecutors?

Author Barry Lopez talks with Terry Gross about his essay on the sexual abuse he suffered as a child

By sending a decorated intelligence officer to prison, the Justice Department shields torturers in the ranks of the CIA

Join us at McNally Jackson on Tuesday, January 15, at 7:00 p.m.

A (relatively) diverse new Congress, Brigitte Bardot's elephant empathy, and life on Ezie Street

The Department of Justice is strangling the pardons process — again

The Soviet Union assesses its Afghan campaign (March 2009)

The question should be whether to cut the deficit right now, not how

“Debates over vaccination, then as now, were often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.”

Fiscal cliffhanger

2012 in three paragraphs

R.I.P. Larry L. King, Harper's Magazine contributor from 1965 to 1971

Why efforts to contain disease are often seen as conspiracies to sell vaccines

How Wilder evokes the music of our lives

Apocalypse Not, an NRA nut, and Nutella shopping at the Vatican

Accounts of the legendary frontline ceasefires on Christmas Day between British and German soldiers

From an 1851 “list of imitation book-backs” sent by Charles Dickens to a London bookbinder.