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Correspondence

Foster Scare

From messages posted over the past five years to the Yahoo group Adopting-from-Disruption, where parents of adopted children offered them for “re-homing,” also known as adoption disruption. The group was…

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The View from 86

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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Last Request

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…

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Bartleby on the Prairie

The unspent life of J. F. Powers

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Mincing Words

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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Brush with History

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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Clowning Achievement

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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The Elements of Guile

From more than 3,000 terms used in emails between employees engaged in corporate wrongdoing, collected from fraud investigations since 2009 and used by the accounting firm Ernst & Young in…

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The Lady in Rose-Colored Glow

Willa Cather's sole surviving full letter to Edith Lewis

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