From the encrypted diaries of William Thomas Prestwood, a man who lived in Appalachia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of the decryptions are collected in Cipher: Decoding ...

Americans are finally beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the inequalities in income and wealth that mark our society. Lately, this realization has been helped along by an unexpected source: the ...

A woman’s foot presses into my face as I lie masturbating on a floor in Bushwick, and the world is on fire. The air quality in New York City is officially the worst on earth: smoke from Canadian ...

From an archived version of a blog post titled “How to Murder Your Husband,” which was allegedly written in 2011 by Nancy Brophy, who was put on trial in April for shooting and killing her husband in ...

Earl Shorris’s book about the Clemente Course in the Humanities, The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor, will be published in 2013 by W. W. Norton. He was awarded a National ...

In the September 2025 issue of Harper’s Magazine, a selection from Jeff Kisseloff’s book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth ...

It was a mild May evening in South Carolina’s Congaree National Park, and Raphael Sarfati stood on a trail beneath a loblolly pine he’d chosen as a landmark. The horizon to his left glimmered with ...

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The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps. That I woke at all & ...

The story begins, as so many do, with a journey. In this case, it’s a seemingly simple one: a young girl, cloaked in red, must carry a basket of food through the woods to her bedridden grandmother.

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t ...

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