The news that the United States had killed 150 unnamed individuals in a country halfway around the world with which it is not at war generated barely a ripple of attention, much less any protest, here at home. Remote killing outside of war zones, it seems, has become business as usual. This is a remarkable development, all the more noteworthy in that it has emerged under Barack Obama, who came to office as an antiwar president, so much so that he may be the only person to win the Nobel Peace Prize based on wishful thinking.

“Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all,” explains the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, which leaves us in the idle hands of a woman who has abandoned academe and retreated, alone, to a stone cottage in the Irish countryside. Here, she has given herself over to a ripe compulsion to grammatize her experience of the world. “I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” For the time being, she writes in

Francis Galton was an idealist. He was a scientist, a gentleman, and a reformer. He dreamed, according to Evan Kindley, of “a world remade by asking the right questions.” In 1870, he looked to realize that dream, submitting a seven-page set of questions to 180 of his colleagues in the British Royal Society in which he asked after their education, their temperament, ancestry, religion—even the rim size of their hats. In the years that followed, he would become the “founding father of questionnaire research,” writing several books based on his surveys of his friends and of strangers, and establishing “the

It is fitting that White Nights in Split Town City, the strange and striking debut novel by Annie DeWitt, opens with “When” by Sharon Olds, a poem that pairs atomic dread with the familial. A young mother hears a “noise like somebody’s pressure cooker / down the block, going off.” Holding her small daughter, she steps outside onto the lawn and sees a bright ball in the sky—they watch it “rise and glow and blossom and rise.” Surprisingly, the poem ends not with an image of apocalyptic terror, but one of grace: the child reaching up, arms open to the

Among the mysteries of the strange animals that appear in A Ted Hughes Bestiary—a compilation edited by poet Alice Oswald of his writing about animals real and invented—is how often these creatures strike me as anything but strange. Taking one of his great plunges into the waterways—those “legendary” depths “deep as England”—he encounters an otter with a “round head like a tomcat,” or a pike with its “sag belly and the grin it was born with,” or a trout “Lifting its head in a shawl of water,” or a swaggering mackerel making “the rich summer seas//A million times richer//With the

Instead of calling 911, black America now pulls out its smartphones, in order to document the actions of the death squads that dialing 911 can summon. The camera has made all the difference.

President Obama has made at least fourteen public statements in response to mass shootings during his tenure. By now, the pattern of public response is tragically familiar.

Last January, the chairman of the Republican National Committee tweeted: ‘It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.’ Why, the world wonders, did they end up with Donald Trump as their nominee?

The remarkable thing about Friday’s coup attempt is not that it failed but that, after years of Erdoğan’s relentless purging of his opposition, there was a faction inside the Turkish military strong enough to mount one at all.

Jelani Cobb offers a stunning analysis of the facts and mysteries surrounding the death of Alton Sterling, an African American man who was shot by police. “The most vexing question is why the claim ‘He’s got a gun!’ would culminate in the decision to use deadly force.”