Karl Taro Greenfeld and the novel of inequality 

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Can shame shape society?

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Bellow and the problems of literary biography 

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I just squandered two or three precious should-be-working hours trundling around music-streaming sites looking for “The Banks of Sweet Italy,” my all-time favorite Incredible String Band song. Dotty, druggy, sublime…

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In the nineteenth century, while the European novel was becoming the preeminent narrative form for grown-ups working through the grown-up problems of marriage, adultery, and career, Americans were writing adventure… 

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Torture, treachery, and the CIA

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels of remembering 

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In 492 b.c., an Athenian tragedian named Phrynichus made the disastrous decision to premiere a play about recent political events — as far as we know, the first drama in…

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Toni Morrison’s novels — a formidable shelf of eleven by now, as the author settles in to her mid-eighties — have all been catholicons, correctives to the canon. That strong, sensuous diction —… 

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Langston Hughes in letters

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How the CIA infiltrated student politics

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When inviting a bear from darkest Peru into your terraced London house, the first thing to do is increase the coverage on your homeowners’ insurance policy. “Yes, a bear .…

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Mr. Earnshaw went to Liverpool and he came back with a boy: a “gipsy brat,” a thing hardly human, an “it” talking “over and over again some gibberish that nobody…

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On the intellectual element in modern fiction

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Walter Benjamin on the air

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A novel character emerged from the mists of Second Empire France and roamed the boulevards of Romanticism. This man was Baudelaire’s flâneur, but that’s not all he was. In depressing… 

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From a recently declassified article, written by an author whose name was redacted, published in the winter 1986 issue of Studies in Intelligence, the in-house journal of the CIA.

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This month, when Downton Abbey purrs, Rolls Royce–like, into its fifth season, I’ll be among the 10 million people who loyally tune in for the premiere; but I doubt I’ll…

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The reticence of Penelope Fitzgerald 

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There were dozens of hippie acts in Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s, but most people have only heard of a few: Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.…

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Most Americans are familiar with the 1787 compromise that sought to bring North-South equality to Congressional representation by counting slaves as three fifths of a person, or three fifths of…

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The contradictions of Cass Sunstein

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The story of a morbid curiosity 

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The evolution of a flawed species

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Marilynne Robinson’s unsaved

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Did Wonder Woman fail feminism? 

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Denis Johnson’s heart beats for the lowlifes and fuck-ups, drunks and speed freaks, the losers who are on their last score and the scavengers feeding on the edges of foreign…

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The facts in the case of Haruki Murakami

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