Readings

From Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women, which will be published this month by Princeton University Press. The most enduring and influential monstrous bitch is the she-demon Lamashtu. She…

Read more

From public-service announcements issued in 2025 and 2026 by U.S. state and federal agencies alerting the public to signs of scams involving artificial intelligence. Requests to transfer funds using Cash App,…

Read more

From lyrics of songs on the 2025 album Guardians of the Threshold, a collaboration by the Israeli rappers the Shadow and Subliminal. The Israeli national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, attended the…

Read more

From Blood Is Dripping onto the Courtyard, which was published last month by Two Lines Press. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. When she was adding a capful of…

Read more

From an aerial photograph of Adélie penguins taken by Thomas Sayre-McCord during a research expedition to the Danger Islands in Antarctica and published by the NASA Earth Observatory in July.…

Read more

From My Family Album, which will be published this month by W. W. Norton. When we look at the face of an anthropoid ape, such as a bonobo, it becomes…

Read more

From Middle Slope, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Try poetry, try song, try The cat had kittens in the backyard And I love…

Read more

By Graham Foust, from Close Second Person, which will be published this month by Flood Editions. There crops up, once, a hostile fact in your mouth—the hostile fact of your…

Read more

From The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4, which was edited by Robert Bernard Hass, Henry Atmore, Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson. The book will be published this month by…

Read more

From a rule proposed by the Department of Defense and published in June in the Federal Register. If finalized, the rule would govern contracts related to the Pentagon’s recruitment advertising.…

Read more

From Croc: How I Invented the World’s Most Popular Shoe, Became a Massive Success, and Almost Destroyed Myself—in 15 Easy Lessons, which will be published this month by HarperCollins Leadership.…

Read more

From an amended rule of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was published in June in the Federal Register. We, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are amending the…

Read more

From The Red Truck, by Rudy Wilson, which will be reissued this month by Cash4Gold Books. Ned died a year ago. We got inside an old icebox down by the…

Read more

From a South Korean surgery-clinic advertisement that reads, from the top left, “Loyalty!” (a South Korean military greeting); “We say a man should have good-looking ‘eyes and nose,’ Sir!”; “Eye…

Read more

From U.S. Patent No. 12648600 B1, which was issued in June by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent, assigned to Matthew Page of Russellville, Tennessee, describes a method…

Read more

From the titles of bills given backronymic names that have been introduced in the U.S. Congress this year. ALERT (HR 7613): Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency Act COOL IT…

Read more

From Jérôme Lindon, by Jean Echenoz, which will be published next month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Monsieur Lindon and I see each other several…

Read more

From “A Deep-Learning Framework Reveals Whole-Body Perturbations at Cell Level,” an article that was published in Nature in May. To map the systemic effects of obesity, scientists fed laboratory mice…

Read more

From the foreword to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, which will be published this month by Counterpoint. In 1974, it became plain to me…

Read more

An image from “Learn!—A New Type of Inscription on a Sling Bullet from Hippos of the Decapolis,” an article by Michael Eisenberg, Arleta Kowalewska, and Gregor Staab that was published…

Read more

From The Responsible Party, which will be published this month by Henry Holt. In the twentieth century, people died all the time and laid themselves to rest without the high-caliber…

Read more

By Kiyoshi Tanimoto, from Hiroshima, 8:15, which will be published this month by the Modern Library. This account, written in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, remained…

Read more

From the Big Mysteries Survey, a poll of 1,675 physicists that was conducted by the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine to assess the community’s views on foundational controversies and submitted…

Read more

From Still House in the Desert: An Eco-contemplation, which will be published next month by Wesleyan University Press. A consciousness without borders spills out. from unread books, a shine in.…

Read more

From The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, which was published last month by Penguin Press. The classicist Allan Bloom called deconstruction “a circus performance.” The conservative columnist Roger Kimball…

Read more

From From the Front Line, which was published last month by New York Review Books. Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. Anatoly Chekhov is going on…

Read more

From a speech delivered by Percival Everett at the Authors Guild Foundation Gala in April. I’m a storyteller, and I’m going to go off script and tell you a story…

Read more

From emails sent by L. Paul Bremer to his wife between August 2003 and June 2004, a period during which he oversaw the Coalition Provisional Authority, the governing body installed…

Read more