Professor Raskolnikov at the Lectern

… s MI6—knows more about human nature (and its fundamental frailty) than anyone else, with the possible exception of his Soviet nemesis, Karla. The business of espionage feeds on an understanding of why people do what they do, what motivates them, their fears, their weaknesses, and how they might be manipulated into acting against their …

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El Cabo de Año

… couldn’t believe, is more real than the person it has swallowed. You begin to believe that the snake will subsist forever on this one person, forever feeding off him. Your eye is on the snake when someone approaches, a plate in hand, an offering. You look up. “Bread?” you ask. It could be cake …

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Weirdo Capital of the West

… sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Smell Ya Later

… sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Stress Test for Free Speech

… and posed a threat to Facebook as a news source, Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein explained this year in Wired, Facebook fully integrated news into its News Feed. The platform soon surpassed Google (Wired again) “in referring readers to publisher sites” and “effectively owned the news.” Last year, 45 percent of American adults got at …

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The House for the Soul

… elegiac tension, haunted as it is by the specter of his own mortality. Early on, he recounts seeing a CT scan showing a 50- percent blockage in the main artery feeding his heart. “Sitting numbly in that dark room,” he writes, “I felt as if I were getting a glimpse of how I was …

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Her Too

… about the tools?”

Four years later, my mom was 30 feet off the ground, sweating through her hibiscus-pink Hanes T-shirt as she balanced on scaffolding, feeding wires down a conduit in a freestanding cinder-block wall. The wall swayed in the wind and vibrated to the beat of pile drivers pounding columns of …

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Long Live the Library

… from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Strange Fruit and Stolen Lives

… sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Call of the Wild

… sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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