By Margaret Drabble, from The Pure Gold Baby, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Drabble is the author of many novels and the editor of The Oxford Companion to…

Read more

From recent mental-health evaluations of John Hinckley Jr., included in court documents submitted in April in support of a request by his attorneys to increase the amount of time Hinckley…

Read more

Read more

By Charlotte Brontë, from an essay written while she was a twenty-six-year-old student at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. The essay, dated August 5, 1842, was discovered last year in…

Read more

By Jonathan Franzen, from a footnote to his translation of “Nestroy and Posterity,” a 1912 essay by the Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). In the…

Read more

Read more

From previously unpublished descriptions of Adolf Hitler’s responses to films he watched in 1938 and 1939. The notes, written by Hitler’s adjutants as part of daily records of his activities…

Read more

Read more

From an April 30 police report and subsequent affidavit on the arrest of Jacob Forster, a graduate student in chemistry at Washington State University, who is charged with the attempted…

Read more

By A. A. Milne, published in the January 1919 issue of The Green Book, a literary journal by and for staff of British Military Intelligence unit MI7b, which created propaganda during…

Read more

From documents submitted by Sue Grant, an expert witness, in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Henry’s Turkey Service, the operator of a turkey-processing plant…

Read more

From emails exchanged by employees of the U.S. State Department, an anonymous Iraqi man known here by the pseudonym Omar, and Omar’s brother. In 2011, Omar, who had worked as…

Read more

By Arlette Farge, from The Allure of the Archives, published this month for the first time in English by Yale University Press. Farge is a historian of eighteenth-century France and…

Read more

From observational notes cited in “Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography of Advertising Response in the Family Living Room,” by the Australian researchers Laknath Jayasinghe and Mark Ritson, in the June…

Read more

By Amos Oz, from the story collection Between Friends, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Oz is the author of several books, including, most recently, Jews and Words. Translated…

Read more

Read more

Read more

A story created as part of TimeSlips, a dementia-treatment program in which groups of patients are shown photographs and prompted to narrate them, in order to replace “the pressure to…

Read more

From previously unpublished excerpts of a 1978 interview with Susan Sontag by Jonathan Cott. An edited version of the interview appeared in the October 4, 1979, issue of Rolling Stone.…

Read more

By Mark Kingwell, from a keynote speech delivered in May at the annual meeting of the Writers’ Union of Canada and published in the Ottawa Citizen. Kingwell is a professor…

Read more

Read more

From comments included in a petition addressed to the artist Kenneth Goldsmith, the website UbuWeb, and LABOR gallery in Mexico City, who in May jointly issued a call for volunteers…

Read more

From a complaint filed against several bloggers by John Steele, an Illinois attorney whose firm, Prenda Law, claims its mission is to fight copyright piracy. According to court documents, Prenda…

Read more

By Gretchen Marquette, published in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Marquette lives and works in Minneapolis.

Read more

By Vaishali Raode, from Mi Hijra, Mi Lakshmi (“I Am a Hijra, I Am Lakshmi”), an account of the life of Lakshmi Narayan Tripathi, a transgender-rights activist in the Indian…

Read more

Read more

Read more

From “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” by S. Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg, Rebecca Roache, published last year in Ethics, Policy & Environment. A widely cited report by the United Nations…

Read more