Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres

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The soothing clarity of Shirley Hazzard

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Elegy IV (detail), from the series Arctic Elegy, by DM Witman © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York “Don’t say that he’s hypocritical / Say rather that he’s apolitical,” Tom…

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The corrupt business of deportation

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On the Jesus trilogy

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If it weren’t for the black death, the fourteenth-century merchant Francesco di Marco Datini might have left no trace in history. A workaholic Tuscan with offices from Bruges to Barcelona,…

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Charles Bowden’s borderlands

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On Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Spreading Fires During the Great Kanto Earthquake, a newspaper illustration of the 1855 earthquake in Edo, Japan. Courtesy Special Collections, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library A metropolis can transform, and even…

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Wordsworth at 250

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Tracing the origins of the German nation

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A Cotton Office in New Orleans, by Edgar Degas. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France In 1873, while visiting family in America, Edgar Degas painted a scene from his uncle’s…

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On women’s history and group biography

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How not to write about Andy Warhol

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Discussed in this essay: Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris; Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses; Elizabeth DiSavino’s Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky’s Forgotten Ballad Collector; Percival Everett’s Telephone over chess.…

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Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

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On Jacques Tati

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Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at an annual gathering, 1928 Courtesy Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library Last summer, Philadelphia proclaimed…

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On the long shadow of Maoism

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The cold, frenzied genius of Kleist

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The first history of the most remote ocean

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Design for a grotesque mask by Johann Ulrich Stapf © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Witch hunts have always been a tool of those in power. As such, they shed…

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The life of Robert Stone

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There’s much to be said for being maladjusted. More and more, perhaps, as the environment to which one is expected to adjust becomes more ruinous. The climate activist Greta Thunberg…

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The end of a literary marriage

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On the specious new history podcasts

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On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti

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On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés

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