From “Mookie and Me,” a short story, which was published in the Winter 2020 issue of The Missouri Review. The bleachers at this little alternative college are full of kids…

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From the lyrics to a rap performed by Daniel Kritenbrink, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, in a music video he released in February for Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year.…

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From images in “From the Bottlecap to the Bottleneck: Frequent Esophageal Impaction of Bottlecaps Among Young Males in a Small University Town,” by Mattis Bertlich et al., which was published…

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From the poetry collection A Better Place Is Hard to Find, which was published in October 2020 by The Song Cave. I thought I saw a bee’s Nest made of…

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From public comments sent to government officials in Atascadero, California, where a ten-foot, two-hundred-pound monolith appeared in December and was torn down by a Christian group a day later. The…

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From reports of deaths that have resulted from attempted pranks and stunts on social media since 2018. Overdosed on Benadryl while attempting to hallucinate Asphyxiated while attempting to pass out…

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From On Violence and On Violence Against Women, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The times we live in oblige any feminist to reckon with…

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From Finding the Raga, which was published last month by New York Review Books. 1. What is a raga? To answer this question we must first acquire a sense of…

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From instructions for a remote math test at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario in October 2020. Complete the practice quiz. After the practice quiz, start the setup test. Complete the…

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From a conversation with Werner Herzog, conducted by Ian Michna for Jenkem, a skateboarding magazine. ian michna: Can you hear me? werner herzog: I can see you. ian michna: You…

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From the essay “Dear Friends,” which was published in the Winter 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review. i have a friend who has never read a single word I have…

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From “Inside Stories,” an essay published in the Winter 2021 issue of Five Points. I used to visit an elderly woman who lived in a single room in an apartment…

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From The Killing Hills, which will be published in June by Grove Press. A few miles down the blacktop, Mick slowed for a man walking, then steered around him and…

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From a conversation on Facebook that was published in a January opinion of the Tennessee Supreme Court. The court suspended Winston Sitton from practicing law for four years for making…

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From actions taken during legislative sessions by members of Taiwan’s parliament between 2001 and 2021. Tore up proposals Unplugged loudspeakers to prevent the passage of bills Sprayed members of the…

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From reviews of superhero movies published between 2016 and 2020. Spider-Man 2 is a superhero movie for people who don’t watch superhero movies Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a…

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From the subject lines of fund-raising emails sent out during the 2020 campaign season. Hey So . . . I need to be up-front I see you, I love you I’m blown away…

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From a complaint filed against the City of Boston in January by the Satanic Temple. The Constitution permits legislative prayers, but the prayer-selection process must be nondiscriminatory. Boston affords its…

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From a manuscript in progress. Let they who thought all that up enjoy more of that while I take care of this customer who may not know I am not…

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From Living in Data, which will be published in May by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thorp is a data artist and an instructor at New York…

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From passages of letters included in Love, Kurt, a collection of messages written between 1941 and 1945 by Vonnegut to his girlfriend Jane, whom he married in 1945, which was…

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From a list of words banned by software used at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which took place remotely in October 2020. The program prevented these…

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From abstracts of articles published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Early Human Development. The works were flagged for review by the publisher, Elsevier, after a college student wrote a letter…

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From anonymous accounts written by seven different men on death row in the United States, collected in Right Here, Right Now, edited by Lynden Harris, which will be published next…

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From a statement made via Zoom by Father Tim Hazelwood, a spokesman for the Association of Catholic Priests, which is based in Ireland, during the organization’s annual meeting last October.…

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From the notebook of an editor at the New York Post who interviewed Melvin Paulino, an employee at a Chipotle restaurant in New York City, in December. Interpreted on-site from the…

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From a December 2020 telephone conversation between Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev, an FSB agent, and Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader whom Kudryavtsev attempted to assassinate on an airplane in August…

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From an email conversation between Mikaël Gómez Guthart and Ariana Harwicz after meeting at a book launch for their works in Paris last year. The discussion was published in the…

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