By Wolfgang Hilbig, from “I”, published in 1993 by S. Fischer Verlag and due out for the first time in English in July from Seagull Books. Hilbig was born in…

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From a debate in February in the Utah State Legislature about House Bill 74, which specifies that consent for sexual contact cannot be given in circumstances in which a person…

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By John Edgar Wideman. Wideman is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

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From emails about an antigay protest organized by the Westboro Baptist Church in 2002. The emails were included in the FBI’s file on Fred Phelps, who founded the church in…

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By William M. Arkin, from Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare, out next month from Little, Brown. Arkin is a former army intelligence analyst and the author…

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From posts to Instapray, an app that allows users to post and request prayers. God, please help me overcome my Internet addiction. It is ruining my life. Who wants to…

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From Lynching in America, a report published in February by the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that litigates on behalf of indigent and marginalized defendants.

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From “Taking Animal News Seriously: Cat Tales in the New York Times,” a study by Matthew C. Ehrlich, a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, published…

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By Rae Armantrout, from the January/February 2015 issue of The Believer. Armantrout is the author of many collections of poems, including Itself, published by Wesleyan University Press in February.

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From tweets by companies alluding to current events between 2011 and 2014. @KennethCole Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available…

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By Joshua Cohen, from Book of Numbers, out next month from Random House. Cohen is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. Toward the end D-Unit had been working on the…

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From references to the moon in poems by Frank Stanford (1948–1978), who was best known for his epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Stanford’s selected…

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From a class-action lawsuit filed in February against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, for excessively fining and imprisoning residents for minor infractions. In March, the Department of Justice concluded that…

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From a list of Thai ghosts, compiled by Andrew Alan Johnson, an assistant professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and the author of Ghosts of the New City, published last…

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From an interview in the Spring 2015 issue of The Paris Review. Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian novelist whose books include The Days of Abandonment, My Brilliant…

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By Masha Gessen, from The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, out last month from Riverhead Books. Gessen is the author of several books, including The Man Without a…

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By Justin E. H. Smith, from “The Fundamentals of Gelastics,” a work in progress. Smith’s latest book, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (Princeton), will be published in June. In…

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From entries in the India Book of Records, founded in 2004 by Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, who holds the Guinness world record for constructing the largest screwdriver.

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From How to Get Rid of Homeless, a collection of forum posts compiled by Matteo Bittanti and published in January by Concrete Press, Bittanti’s publishing company. The posts, which were made on…

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