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From the transcript of a March 7 Senate Banking Committee hearing on enforcement of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which requires U.S. financial institutions to help the federal government…

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From more than 200 questions posed by jurors over two days in March during the trial of Jodi Arias. Arias, who stands accused of the 2008 murder of her former…

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By Joshua Cohen, from Attention! A (Short) History, published this month in the United Kingdom by Notting Hill Editions. Cohen, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most…

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From an exchange last summer between Jean-Pierre Decool, a member of the French National Assembly, and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Translated from the French by Jess Cotton. question Jean-Pierre…

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From correspondence recently received and sent by members of Washington State’s Personalized License Plate Review Committee. shgnwgn — We feel that this plate could be offensive to good taste and…

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By Mary Ruefle, from Issue 2 of Unstuck. Ruefle is the author of several books, including, most recently, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. The day the living room flooded…

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From a February 4 complaint by the U.S. Department of Justice against the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s, charging that S&P fraudulently inflated ratings on residential-mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized…

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From a letter to Mark Twain, postmarked October 1, 1879, from Carl Jensen, a customs officer in Stubbekøbing, Denmark. Twain’s annotation reads, “Preserve this remarkable letter.” Dear Mark Twain: Letters…

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By Karl Ove Knausgaard, from My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love, the second volume of his six-volume autobiographical novel, to be published next month by Archipelago Books. Translated…

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From In Search of a Concrete Music, by composer Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95), published last year for the first time in English by University of California Press. Published in French in…

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From a January 22 report by New Mexico State Police officer Clinton Norris. Tanner Ruane and Mark Staake were arrested before they carried out their plan and are awaiting trial.…

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By Lydia Davis, published in the 2013 issue of NOON. Davis’s “Five Stories from Flaubert” appeared in the November 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. I’m simply not interested in reading…

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By Claude Lévi-Strauss, from a 1986 lecture at the Ishizaka Foundation in Tokyo, included in Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World, published last month by Harvard University Press.…

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From the unpublished diaries of LeRoy Wiley Gresham (1847–65), son of John J. Gresham, twice mayor of Macon, Georgia. LeRoy, a longtime invalid confined to his bed or to a…

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By Hafiz (c. 1320–89), published in the November/December 2012 issue of The American Poetry Review. Translated by Matthew Rohrer, who consulted earlier English versions rather than the Persian.

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From Italo Calvino: Letters 1941–1985, out this month from Princeton University Press. Franco Maria Ricci, a publisher, commissioned Calvino to prepare a text for a volume containing reproductions of the…

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By Christa Wolf, from City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolf, who spent most of her life in East…

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From open letters by the actor Gérard Depardieu, addressed to French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and to the Russian press. In January, Depardieu obtained Russian citizenship in order to evade…

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From the October 29, 2012, testimony of Martin Dumont to a Canadian public inquiry into corruption charges against various Montreal city officials. Dumont was an organizer for Union Montréal, the…

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By Jonathan Lethem, from “More Little Tales of the Internet,” published in Issue 59 of Conjunctions. Lethem is the author of many books, including, most recently, Fear of Music. His…

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