The lost glory of America’s railroads

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From a distance, as it hugs the hilly terrain, the fence looks almost decorative — a rambling, rust-colored abstraction. A thin ribbon of road runs alongside, its sandy surface kept…

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By Ralph Nader, from Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, published last month by Nation Books.

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One of the many poignant glimpses of midcentury America afforded me by a fiftieth-anniversary reading of the Warren Report was the story of an ephemeral conservative organization called the American…

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From a video of senior Egyptian army officers at a meeting held by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, leaked last October by the Islamist website Rassd News Network; the meeting is thought…

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By Masha Gessen, from Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, out now from Riverhead Books. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, members of the Russian punk-rock…

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From insults reportedly made to French presidents, collected in De voyou à pov’ con, by Raphaël Meltz, published in 2012 by Robert Laffont. (See page 38 for an Annotation on…

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Fighting for the right to insult the French president

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John Kerry and the myth of foreign policy

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