By Carol Ruth Silver, from a July 3, 1961, entry in a secret journal of her experiences at the maximum-security Mississippi State Penitentiary, in Parchman. One month earlier, the twenty-two-year-old…

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By Norman Rush, from Granta 126, published earlier this year. Rush is the author of several works of fiction, including, most recently, Subtle Bodies. From an early age, I was…

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Is E. E. Cummings a serious writer?

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From a list of edits made by the Central Board of Film Certification, a statutory censorship body tasked with regulating publicly screened films in India, taken from the CBFC’s website.…

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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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A Taliban intelligence chief’s death and resurrection

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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 “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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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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