The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

This is the piece of writing that inspired me to make the turn from fiction and corporate research into journalism. It’s the best reframing of American society that I’ve ever read. And kudos to Harper’s for running it. It’s not often you see anarchist anthropologists making highly visible contributions to public discourse.

-A. Madrigal

An undercover report on Afghanistan’s drug-smuggling border police that is now heavily used for intelligence training.

On the political climate in Arizona.

Scenario-based forecasts on the future of America, in the style of the C.I.A’s National Intelligence Estimate.

Prison medicine and the coming plague.

The author joins his father’s work crew, gutting out foreclosed houses in Florida and interviewing their former residents.

Our debt, conscious or unconscious, to what has come before, and what it can tell us about copyright, the public domain, and the complicated relationship between creators and consumers.

How the U.S. Army went evangelical and turned a war into a crusade.

The poet and his love affair with Italian motorbikes (and also lots of women.)

A conversation with NYU Law Professor Philip Alston on the legality of ‘targeted killings’ by drones, which have made headlines in Pakistan, but also have been deployed by the C.I.A. in countries like Yemen.

“As a middle-aged queer, I could not break cover. And, as a middle-aged black man, I was embarrassed that these white boys from this melodrama mattered to me anyway.”