Last year, Hari Kunzru took a walk around London. Or not quite a walk but a dérive, a French term appropriated by the Situationist International political group that is often translated to mean ...

They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It took all day, most of the night. There was beating ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 Fiscal Years (Draft), Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992 Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 Fiscal Years (Revised Draft), Office of the ...

Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating ...

This past January, Goldman Sachs CEO and chairman David Solomon strode onto a stage at the bank’s lower Manhattan headquarters to launch the first “Investor Day” in the famously secretive ...

“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read ...

Let’s start with a wicked little paragraph. Guy Debord chose to kill himself the old-fashioned way; Jean-Luc Godard—“the dumbest Swiss Maoist of them all,” in the words of the amusing ...

The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. Scribner. 352 pages. $28. After a night of partying, two of Lizzie’s closest friends went swimming in the East River, and one was carried away by a current and ...

I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The ...

Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our forests; others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species, ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...