From a conversation with Raul, a resident of Manhattan, included in The Edge Becomes the Center, an oral history of gentrification in New York City, by D. W. Gibson, out…

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By David Graeber, from The Utopia of Rules, published last month by Melville House. Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His most recent article for Harper’s…

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By Wendell Berry, from Our Only World, out this month from Counterpoint. Berry’s essay “Faustian Economics” appeared in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

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By Krystyna Dabrowska, from Czas i przeslona (Time and Aperture), published last year by Znak. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

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From a list of reasons given for missing work, collected by CareerBuilder in a survey completed by 2,303 hiring managers and human-resources professionals.

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From accounts of threats made against employees of the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management since 2010, featured last October in High Country News. (See “The Great…

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By Eliot Weinberger, from Little Star #6. Weinberger’s books include An Elemental Thing and Oranges & Peanuts for Sale.                                                           the creation On June 9, 1603, Samuel de Champlain attended an Algonquin…

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From domain names of online dating networks. Amish-Online-Dating DarwinDating

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From comments appended to a post made last November on OathKeepers.org, a “non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders.” The post sought volunteers to guard…

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From a new translation of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, a novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Moya, a Salvadoran writer, is the author of many books, including Senselessness and…

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From a complaint filed last October by Unilever, the manufacturer of the Best Foods and Hellmann’s brands of mayonnaise, against Hampton Creek, which produces a vegan condiment called Just Mayo.

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By Saul Bellow, from a previously unpublished essay written in 1951 and included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor and out…

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By John Gray, adapted from an article in the October 2014 issue of Prospect. Gray is the author of many books, including False Dawn, Straw Dogs, and The Silence of…

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From messages written on birch-bark scrolls between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries in Old Novgorodian, a precursor of Russian. A cache of scrolls, preserved for centuries in mud, was found…

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From posts to Five-O, an app created by three African-American teenage siblings that allows users to comment on interactions with police officers.

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From a recently declassified article, written by an author whose name was redacted, published in the winter 1986 issue of Studies in Intelligence, the in-house journal of the CIA.

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By Emily Anderson, from “Three Little Novels,” published in Conjunctions: 63. Anderson erased portions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books to “create an alternative series.” Anderson’s first book, Little:…

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From a list of slang terms used by British students to describe drunkenness or the effects of drugs, included by Tony Thorne in the fourth edition of the Dictionary of…

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