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Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wandered and Other Stories; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

A history of how risk management profits from manufacturing new forms of uncertainty and insecurity.

The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon, Sarajevo, Radovan Karadzic,

How did everything a writer had known and loved come violently apart?

No one dies for poetry anymore, not even in Russia. Enter the oligarchs, who steer clear of Putin’s ire by sponsoring literary prizes.

Illustration for My So-Called "Post-Feminist" Literary Life

Slut-shaming, name-calling and no respect: welcome to life in literary America for a 21st century female author.

Engraving depicting Athanasius Kircher

How did a man who got so many things wrong become an intellectual celebrity in his own lifetime?

An unreliable anthropologist of traditional societies is a no less dubious diagnostician of the contemporary world.

Blogs

Todd Akin, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan all have me thinking of June Jordan’s great “Poem about My Rights.”

August 22, 2012

A conversation with election law expert Richard Hasen on the true scope of voter fraud, the power of the ACORN myth and John Roberts’s scary interest in the Voting Rights Act.

 

August 17, 2012

Stephen Colbert took Hayes to task on his show, holding up Hayes's book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.

August 6, 2012

If you’re under the false impression that the world is falling into utter moral disrepair, turn your eyes toward Pompeii.

July 26, 2012

McGovern has always practiced a politics that runs deeper; a politics rooted in his love of America’s history, its literature and its possibility.

July 19, 2012

There’s a new Disney exhibit at the Reagan library. But what are drawings of Bambi and Cinderella doing in the National Archives?

July 9, 2012

The Mormon Church is a corporation, says author and essayist Terry Tempest Williams, and there is reason to fear a Romney presidency....

May 27, 2012

230,000 long-term unemployed workers lost their benefits on Sunday and the system is about to get a whole lot worse.

May 18, 2012

Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story ignores the fact that in every century and decade, sadomasochistic erotica has broken into the mainstream.

April 16, 2012

A poet passionately engaged with writing and politics, she said "art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage."

March 28, 2012