History

Becoming Human

By Roberto Calasso, Translated by Richard Dixon

From The Celestial Hunter, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translated from the Italian. In the time of the Great Raven even the invisible was…

The Black Axe

By Sean Williams,

Eleven years ago, on a bitter January night, dozens of young men, dressed in a uniform of black berets, white T-shirts, and black pants, gathered on a hill overlooking the…

The Pain Refugees

By Brian Goldstone,

It began with a loud pop. Though Austin Sell had suffered from severe back pain since childhood, on a clear autumn morning in 2011, not long after his twenty-first birthday,…

Village People

By Terry Southern,

By Terry Southern (1924–95), from an unpublished manuscript written in 1952. It is included in Making It Hot for Them, a collection of his writings edited by Nile Southern that…

If These Walls Could Talk

By Lauren Markham,

According to one Norse myth, the gods needed a wall. Asgard, their kingdom, had once been surrounded by barricades, but a war had destroyed them. When the gods decided to…

Nobody Knows

By Rebecca Solnit,

When I was eighteen, I spent several months working as a bus girl at a diner. It was a cheerful-looking place, facing San Francisco Bay. The kitchen was L-shaped: the…

The Bodies in The Forest

By Masha Gessen,

By Masha Gessen, from Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, which will be published next month by Columbia Global Reports. Gessen’s book The Future Is History won…

Public Displays of Affection

From descriptions of objects held by the Museum of Broken Relationships, which is located in Zagreb, Croatia, and exhibits mementos submitted anonymously by people around the world. A catalogue of…

The Minds of Others

By David Bromwich, Garth Greenwell, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kelly Clancy, Laila Lalami, Mychal Denzel Smith, T. M. Luhrmann,

Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1944, “and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” But progress through persuasion has never seemed harder to…

Modern Despots

By Aldous Huxley,

In a democratic state any propagandist will have rivals competing with him for the support of the public. In totalitarian states there is no liberty of expression for writers and…

Lines and Lineage

By Tomas van Houtryve,

We often forget that the boundary between the United States and Mexico was not always where it is today. It used to be seven hundred miles farther north, following what…

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