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A middle-aged woman in a brown wool suit tapped my shoulder after mass. She knew my name. She said she had read an interview I gave to an online magazine…

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From posts on mensactivism.org and the affiliated website standyourground.com, which maintains a list of “companies to avoid doing business with due to male bashing.” Just a comment on your latest…

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From forty-nine citations that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to the book Meanderings of Memory, by an author known only as Nightlark, believed to have been published in 1852. In…

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From emails sent in 2011 and 2012 by employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service concerning news reports that ground beef commonly contains lean finely…

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By Sheila Heti, from “How to Be Good When You’re Lost,” in the anthology Where We Are, to be published this fall by Visual Editions. Heti’s contribution, illustrated by Ted…

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From Observed Customer Seating and Standing Behaviors and Seat Preferences Onboard Subway Cars in New York City, by Aaron Berkovich, Brian Levine, Alex Lu, and Alla V. Reddy, researchers for…

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By Caleb Crain, from Necessary Errors, to be published next month by Penguin. According to the pages on Eastern Europe that he had torn from a guide to gay life…

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From focus-group comments on the redesigned Canadian five-dollar bill, which depicts an astronaut floating beside Canadarm2, a robotic arm invented in Canada and used on the International Space Station. The…

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In matters of foreign policy, Congress, and especially the Senate, was designed as a hedge against the abuses exhibited by European monarchs who for centuries had whimsically entangled their countries…

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From a June 7, 1923, letter sent to the personal secretary of Leon Trotsky, then Russian minister of defense, by the Nestle Laboratory for Hair Research in New York City,…

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From remarks in the Montana State Legislature concerning a bill allowing drivers to salvage the carcasses of antelope, deer, elk, and moose killed in automobile accidents. In 2011, there were…

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From The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, dictated by Virginia Woolf to her nephew Quentin Bell when he was a child. Between 1923 and 1927, Bell and his brother Julian hand-produced a…

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From 2,945 occupations listed in the current edition of India’s National Classification of Occupations. Spinning Master Taxing Master Numismatist Rock Slicer Impression Taker Weather Observer

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From a recording of a 1983 meeting between Orson Welles, the film director Henry Jaglom, and an HBO executive. Beginning in 1978, Jaglom met Welles regularly for lunch, and at…

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From an open letter written in March by Bernhard Paul, founder and director of Germany’s Circus Roncalli, to Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic candidate for German chancellor, who in February…

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By Diane Williams, from a collection in progress. Williams’s most recent book is Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. True! Yes! Mother always gave me a tribute with a sigh. I…

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By Patrizia Cavalli, from My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems, a bilingual edition to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Cavalli is the author of…

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By Liao Yiwu, from For a Song and a Hundred Songs, out next month from New Harvest. Liao, who was born in China in 1958, spent four years in prison…

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