Handbooks Archives

Handbooks

Inhale, Execute

From FM 7-22 Holistic Health and Fitness, a training field manual for soldiers. Each sentence was taken from the 244-page guide, which was revised and republished last October by the…

Bearer of Bad News

From the style guide of the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist news website. The guide, which was reportedly written by Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder and editor, was acquired in…

Highly Ineffective People

From the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. The manual, which was declassified in 2008, was intended for distribution to citizens of enemy…

Good Plain English

by Nat Segnit,

The problem with writing manuals

Is Paris Bathing?

From 112 Gripes About the French, a 1945 handbook for American soldiers in occupied France, edited and republished this month by the Bodleian Library.

High-Low, High-Low

by Peter Tyson,

From Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress: Learn to Play the Most Complex Video Game Ever Made, by Peter Tyson, published last year by O’Reilly Media, Inc. When a “strange mood”…

Stumped Speech

by Chris Haire,

Everyone’s Gone Nuts

by Meredith Broussard,

The exaggerated threat of food allergies

Look for the Union Label

by Orson Mason,

Touchy Topics in the Gulf

From “Customs and Culture,” a chapter in the troop-information pamphlet distributed by the U.S. Central Command to all U.S. armed forces in Saudi Arabia. Soldiers are encouraged to keep this…

The Nazi Primer

Translated by Harwood Lawrence Childs,

Excerpts from the standard textbook of the Hitler Youth