From messages posted over the past five years to the Yahoo group Adopting-from-Disruption, where parents of adopted children offered them for “re-homing,” also known as adoption disruption. The group was…

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By Jon Cotner, from issue 5 of Gigantic magazine. Cotner is an artist and poet who teaches at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. The following lines are spoken by participants in…

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From a video of senior Egyptian army officers at a meeting held by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, leaked last October by the Islamist website Rassd News Network; the meeting is thought…

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From a list of more than 100,000 items in storage at the U.S. Army Historical Clearinghouse facility in Anniston, Alabama, released in September by the Army’s Center of Military History…

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From an October 10, 2013, complaint against ten Jewish men, including two rabbis, in New York and New Jersey, accused of running an organization that kidnaps and tortures husbands who…

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By Joy Williams, from Little Star #5. Williams is the author of several works of fiction, including Honored Guest. A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork. “What will you take…

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By Monique Mabelly, from an account of the September 9, 1977, execution by guillotine, at Marseille’s Baumettes prison, of Tunisian prisoner Hamida Djandoubi, published in Le Monde last October. Mabelly,…

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By Masha Gessen, from Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, out now from Riverhead Books. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, members of the Russian punk-rock…

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By Jeff Dolven, from a collection in progress. Dolven is the author of Speculative Music, published last year by Sarabande.

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By Amitava Kumar, from A Matter of Rats, a “short biography” of his hometown of Patna, India, to be published by Duke University Press in April. Patna is the capital…

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From insults reportedly made to French presidents, collected in De voyou à pov’ con, by Raphaël Meltz, published in 2012 by Robert Laffont. (See page 38 for an Annotation on…

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From a 1933 diary entry by George Kennan (1904–2005), with the heading “January, Riga.” Kennan was working for the State Department at the time, in a diplomatic post in Latvia.…

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From additions to Wikipedia entries on women with significant achievements in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, made by volunteers during an event hosted by Brown University last October. An estimated…

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From “Divine Secrets of the RYBAT Sisterhood: Four Senior Women of the Directorate of Operations Discuss Their Careers,” the transcript of a recently declassified 2004 conversation among five high-ranking female…

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“How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” by Lydia Davis, from a collection of stories to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux…

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By Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011), from The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, to be published in March by New York Review Books. Edited by Colin Thubron…

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From a decision by the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand in the case of Ioane Teitiota, who because of rising sea levels fled his home country of Kiribati,…

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By Malcolm Cowley, from a December 20, 1984, letter to Peter Braestrup, editor of Wilson Quarterly. Best known for his literary criticism, Cowley died in 1989. The Long Voyage: Selected…

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From 2012 and 2013 blotters of the police department in Unalaska, Alaska, a town of 4,400 in the Aleutian Islands.

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By Jesse Ball, from his novel Silence Once Begun, out next month from Pantheon. Ball is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including, most recently, The Curfew.

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