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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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By Dorthe Nors, from Karate Chop, a short-story collection to be published in February by Graywolf in collaboration with A Public Space. Nors is the author of several works of…

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From an interview conducted by Youngmi Mayer with Jung Won Oh, Ko Jun Ja, and Mun Yeon Ok, female divers on Korea’s Jeju Island, published in Lucky Peach: The Gender…

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By Siri Hustvedt, from a keynote lecture delivered in Paris at this year’s winter meeting of the Société de Neurophysiologie, to be published in a special issue of Clinical Neurophysiology,…

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From annotations written by John Stuart Mill on his personal copies of the first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, which were published in two volumes, in 1841 and 1844.…

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From a passage dated December 30, 1668, in the journal of Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, discovered earlier this year by Kate Loveman and partially quoted in The Journal…

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From explanatory subtitles to entries in the U.S. edition of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, an eleven-volume, 7,216-page work compiled by more than 1,000 scholars over the past twenty-five years and…

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From “Holy Springs and Holy Water: Underestimated Sources of Illness?” published last year in the Journal of Water and Health.

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