When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag ...

The rules of the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo are simple: From the strike of midnight on a Friday morning in February, your kill crew has forty hours to shoot as many swamp rats as possible. You can hunt in ...

This article is only available as a PDF to subscribers. Download PDFTags 20th century Authority Conscience Cruelty Experiments Human experimentation in psychology Obedience Psychology United States ...

When I was a young reporter, I envied my elders’ ability to write obituaries of famous people. Having the last word on someone renowned seemed to me like high-end journalism, especially when it ...

The parent in question protested that a cheaper instrument would “damage or destroy” his son’s talent. The names of all students have been changed. There are at least $175 million in unused funds ...

The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman. Princeton University Press. 336 pages. $29.95. What we imagine when we think of deportation proceedings, if we ...

Excerpted from an article by E. Wade Davis in the November 1983 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology. A fuller account of Davis’s search for the Haitian zombie poison was documented in The ...

For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: Firstly, the intensity of the craving — if I have any work to do, I must ...

From the Archive Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day.

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The U.S. Military Academy at West Point rehung a painting of a Confederate Civil War general in its library; kindergarteners will now be taught to identify the muzzle, barrel, and trigger of a gun; ...

David Foster Wallace was a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.