From Trapped in the Present Tense, which will be published next month by Counterpoint Press. It’s possible to construct a statistical mosaic of American life out of the 332 million…

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From a conversation between Olaf Scholz and two eleven-year-olds, Pauline and Romeo, who were interviewing candidates for chancellor of Germany. The exchange aired in September on Late Night Berlin. Scholz…

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From an essay that appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of The Threepenny Review. Yesterday, while on extended hold with an appliance store, I deleted dead people from my Contacts.…

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From Fight Night, a novel, which was published in October by Bloomsbury. Almost every day Grandma gets a call about someone she knows being dead. You can tell because she…

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From prompts in 642 Things to Write About, a book distributed to seniors at Hudson High School in Hudson, Ohio. In September, after parents complained that the book asked students…

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From the 2021 Red Suit Survey, which polled hundreds of professional Santas in the United States. What made you decide to be a Santa? I had the look I had…

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From Issue 14 of Lana Turner. When I was almost a woman the men in the radio called someone I thought might be me an angel and a baby. I…

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By an artist and inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Spencer created this replica of his cell out of card stock and sold it on…

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From The Dawn of Everything, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In the mid-twentieth century, a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchs…

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From summaries of books in the library of Hernando Colón, composed by him and his staff and collected in Libro de los Epítomes. The manuscript was discovered in 2019 among…

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From the website of the consultant Tony Rodrigues, who sells courses for $39.99 claiming to help customers recover suppressed memories of interactions with aliens. Rodrigues says he served first as…

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From “Call of Nature,” an essay that appeared in Issue 2 of Facility: A Magazine About Bathrooms. Humans, earthbound and stuck within seemingly unbreakable systems of oppression, have long admired…

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From Free, a memoir of life in Albania, which was published last month in the United Kingdom by Penguin. In 1995, my father began to practice his English with “the…

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From The Perishing, which will be published this month by Counterpoint Press. My name is Sarah Shipley and I’ve slept with five women. Since I married a man, no one…

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From In the Midst of Civilized Europe, which was published last month by Metropolitan Books. In the years after the Holocaust, survivors began compiling memorial books, one for each city…

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From a photograph tweeted in August by Christian Climate Action of Tim Hewes, an Anglican priest, at the News Corp. offices in London. Hewes sewed his lips together to protest the…

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From the website mcbroken.com, which tracks broken McDonald’s ice-cream machines across the United States. The machines break down frequently, and McDonald’s franchises are obligated to hire a certified repair person…

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From a manuscript in progress. His poetry collection Howdie-Skelp will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Got up though they may be in heavy-duty gabardine they cavort…

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From headlines since 2003 in the Sydney Morning Herald about Australia’s rapidly spreading population of invasive cane toads. Top End Turns into Cane Toad Heaven Invasion Spreads The City Strikes…

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From On Freedom, which was published last month by Graywolf Press. Time and time again, users testify in drug literature to a sense that substances are imbued with things we…

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From “A Conversation About Trees,” which appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review. I set out here to construct an argument about “nature poetry,” in order eventually…

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From game play of Small Press Tycoon, a publishing industry simulation game released this year by Inpatient Press. The player begins the game with $1,000 and answers a series of…

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From the book When We Cease to Understand the World. The book, a fictionalized retelling of a series of scientific and mathematical discoveries, was published last month by New York…

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The story will be published in the collection Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone next month by Scribner. Dedicated to Bernard Malamud. A colored angel named Levine said to…

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From factors professional athletes have invoked since 2000 in explaining why they tested positive for banned substances. Whiskey Ten burgers and two steaks from Mexico Uncastrated wild boar meat Deer…

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From an essay that considers the album It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil, and is included in the collection Long Players, which was published in August by Bloomsbury.…

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During her time working as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981, Calle took photographs of the rooms she was assigned to clean. The Hotel, which includes her observations…

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From a letter written by the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas to his peer and friend Stan Brakhage in April 1966. It is included in the anthology Letters as Films, edited…

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