After oil was discovered on their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world. Then they began to be murdered off mysteriously. In 1924 the nascent FBI sent a team of undercover agents, including a Native American, to the Osage reservation.

After all these years, it’s still there, in the back of her mind, lurking. No matter how good things are going, it never quite goes away, this feeling that she should have died that day. And her brush with death is the first thing that strangers tend to notice about her, like a limp or a disfigurement. Once they find out where she went to high school, that’s all they want to talk about.

On the echoes between the world leading up to World War I and our present international trajectory. Then, as globalization, nationalism, and radicalism converged, and tensions within the Balkans served as a spark. Today, conflicts in the Middle East, whose borders were mostly drawn in the wake of World War I, could play a similar role.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.

“My Vassar College Faculty ID affords me free smoothies, free printing paper, paid leave, and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on Earth. It guarantees that I have really good health care and more disposable income than anyone in my Mississippi family. But way more than I want to admit, I’m wondering what price we pay for these kinds of ID’s, and what that price has to do with the extrajudicial disciplining and killing of young black human beings.”

“She has no theories, for example, to explain why she, of all people, felt unburdened by the unspoken rules marking certain subjects off limits for children, or why, for that matter, she has that particular gift, that ability to recall the emotional experiences of adolescence, the confusion, the longing, the rivalries — the memories, in other words, that most of us try to bury as quickly and deeply as we can.”

On the moral responsibility to break unjust laws.

A look at Chicago’s DJ culture in the ’90s.

One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter's label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he'd had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word "Well . . . ," and realized, "That's the sample, right there." He threaded Pendergrass's 20-year-old disco hit "You Can't Hide From Yourself" through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles.

Returning to Forth Worth after two and a half defection years in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald became friends with a Russian emigre family with a son of his age. After Kennedy was shot, they would be called on to translate the Secret Service interrogation of his young Russian wife.

INTERVIEWER: I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of guru, whether political or metaphysical.

LESSING: I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying.

In 1980 a convicted con-man named Melvin Weinberg was sent by the FBI to offers bribes to U.S. Congressmen on behalf of a phony Arab sheik. The Abscam, short for ‘Abdul Scam’, sting brought down for several representatives, but longtime politician John Murtha narrowly avoided offering a bribe on camera.

In the summer of 1982, three Waco teenagers were savagely murdered for no apparent reason. Four men were ultimately charged with the crime. One was executed, two others were given life sentences, and a fourth was sent to death row only to be released after six years. They all may have been innocent.

Joyce Hatto, unknown to even the most ardent classical music collectors until late in her life, released a string of incredible performances of great works, distributed by her husband’s mail-order CD business. But how was it possible for her to record difficult works at such a dizzying rate? And if wasn’t her playing, who was it?

Nearing the end of his career, a Canadian tycoon named Michael DeGroote went for one last deal, investing $100 million to build a Las Vegas in the Dominican Republic. His partners? Two brothers with a criminal past, a con man and an old friend with close ties to the mob.

The stories that sprung up around if not quite about Trump were as brutal and lazy as the man himself; they teased themselves endlessly from one episode to the next, building toward a brutal grand finale in which America’s heroes would murder its villains, on TV, at some time to-be-determined.

Chantix is a pill that decreases the pleasurable effects of cigarettes. It also causes hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and waking nightmares:

A week into my Chantix usage, I started to feel as if the city landscape had imperceptibly shifted around me. Mundane details began to strike me as having deep, hidden significance. The neon arch above McDonald’s: The lights blinked on and off in some sort of pattern, and I needed to crack the code.

"These young men seem to have no conception of the consequences of allying yourself publicly with the far right, even before their hero gets accused of endorsing pedophilia in public. Yiannopoulos has been good to them. They’re having a great time. Over the course of a few hours, I find myself playing an awkward Wendy to these lackluster lost boys as I watch them wrestle with the moral challenge of actually goddamn growing up."

On why the Anthony Weiner story makes people more uncomfortable than simple cheating, the shifting meaning of faithfulness in marriage, and the relationship ideals espoused by Dan Savage:

In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Stylistically speaking, in terms of clothing, they arrived in shirts and pants and shoes (there’s really no other way to say it). They had haircuts, but it didn’t really look it. While other bands were mumbling or over-enunciating their dreary positions or penny-candy philosophies, Pavement kind of screamed for a generation. But they did it in a way that was so deeply American that it was almost Scandinavian.

Playwright Will Eno profiles the band and their cult as they grow up and prepare for a reunion.