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Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

Think-Tanked

From an exchange on Signal between Mike Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and SiegedSec, a group of self-described “gay…

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An Oral History of Violence

From V13: Chronicle of a Trial, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Carrère compiled the following text from the testimony of victims at the trial…

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Stop Motion

From Everything Flirts, which will be published next month by the University of Iowa Press. I drove from Madison back to St. Louis, took the usual exit from the freeway,…

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Bitcoin Plunges

From reports about the circumstances of the deaths of cryptocurrency millionaires and billionaires. A cryptocurrency influencer accused of perpetrating one of the largest crypto scams in Spanish history was found…

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The Woman-Dream I Suffered

From Slaveroad, which will be published this month by Scribner. Lucy Gantt Sheppard brings the glass teapot into a room too full of furniture to breathe. A woman not small,…

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Channeling

From Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a new edition of which was published in July by Graywolf Press. There is a button on the remote control called fav. You can…

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Pop Tsars

From “The Blushing Brain,” a study conducted at the University of Amsterdam that was published in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Sixty-three female adolescents aged 16–20 from…

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Both Roads

From Liontaming in America, which was published last month by New Directions. I was reaching for a passage to the world they came from, the bodies slowly turning into the…

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Poison Ivy

From Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis, which will be published this month by Dey Street. At the end of Jordan Long’s sophomore year at Morehouse—a…

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The Instant Monet Enters the Studio

From L’instant précis où Monet entre dans l’atelier, which was published in 2022 by Éditions de Minuit. Translated from the French in May by Pauline Cochran. I was so taken…

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Hooked on Phonics

From Planes Flying Over a Monster, which was published last month by Catapult. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. The Grande Bibliothèque is an enormous glass edifice that stands opposite the Berri–UQAM…

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The Wolfe Pack

From the introduction to a new edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which was published last month by Picador. More than half a century after Tom Wolfe’s…

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Atticus Fins

From an interview with David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University, conducted in February by Lisa Margonelli for The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast. david shiffman: When most…

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Beyond the Pleasure Principle

From Scaffolding, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One day, with nothing else to do, I go back to my old journals, rows and rows…

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Good Ol’ Boys’ Club

From a motion filed in March in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. According to the 2020 census, 64.3 percent of the voting-age population in Newbern is…

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[…]

From […], which was published in March by Milkweed Editions. Aggressors also grieve. What hell a lucky life can be. I tried but couldn’t catch fish in a mirage, headed…

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Brother, Go

From an interview with the Sudanese human-rights lawyer Jamal Abdallah Khamis, recorded last October by Human Rights Watch. On June 14, 2023, paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and Arab militias overwhelmed…

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Spectre of Consequence

From headlines that have appeared in the British magazine The Spectator since January. Confessions of a Fortysomething Brace Face I’m Proud I Squandered My Wealth My Life of Genteel Poverty…

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September

From Carbonate of Copper, which will be published next year by Fordham University Press. Mirror symmetry in the wilderness. The marauders with their sirens and sticks. An astrolabe for the…

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The Eyes of Others

From “To Know and to Know Not,” a lecture delivered in May at the annual Premio Gregor von Rezzori ceremony in Florence, Italy. If you are from somewhere else, living…

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Duty-Free

From a post on Notebook, MUBI’s online film publication. “My fiancé is waiting for me in Las Vegas,” she says. She keeps on talking about her fiancé and apologizing for…

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Museum Pieces

From Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, which was published last month by ZE Books. The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the…

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Logorrhea

From Bjarki, Not Bjarki, which was published in January by the University of Iowa Press. What is wood? Consider the teenager’s nomenclature for an erect pecker. A peckerwood is a…

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All Abroad

From Le Dépays, which was published in May by Film Desk Books. You’re returning from Hong Kong, oyster of the hundred thousand pearls, and from the very first train (the…

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Ezekiel Machine

From Two-Step Devil, which will be published next month by Grove Press. The Prophet stood on his porch, taking in the landscape. The soft earth was shooting up green everywhere…

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Roid Page

From advice published on the website of the Enhanced Games, a sporting competition set to take place next year. Participating athletes will be permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs. The event’s…

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Sad Copy

From the website of the Japanese retailer Muji. Muji was founded in 1980 in a thorough rationalization of the manufacturing process. The ensuing products are remarkably pure and fresh: succinct.…

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Simply

From Go Figure, which will be published this month by Wesleyan University Press. “were molecular machines operating on energy freely available from such sources as thermodynamic processes.” It sounds so…

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