The attorney general exemplifies the growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump.

A hundred and fifty years ago, slightly more, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. In the Civil War, in the lush fields of the South, Americans first, as a culture, began to imagine death in numbers. Rosters of soldiers, as well as lists of war casualties, were not common practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials feared responsibility for the dead by numbering or naming them, and military leaders felt an accurate count might embolden their enemies.

On the history of the Bund, an armed, socialist anti-Zionist group that was once the most popular Jewish party in Poland until they were murdered in the Holocaust.

On the difficulty of diagnosing chronic lyme disease and the persistent struggle to do no harm.

“Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable. Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.”

How New York City responds to terrorism.

An ode to the guitarist.

“Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms.”

Prison rape is an epidemic; but the bulk of abuses are not by prisoners themselves, but by guards and other prison workers.