“Today, there are nearly 100 active micronations around the world, although the number fluctuates frequently. They engage in diplomacy, have feuds, military uniforms, and self-fashioned leaders with opulent titles, because—well, why not?”

“Today, the official records of these older killings are often inaccurate. If they aren’t corrected soon, the true stories may never come out; many witnesses to the crimes of the Jim Crow era are aging and dying.”

“Through the narrator Nick, Fitzgerald describes the nightmarish, soul destroying, drunken despair of the mortgaged millions trapped in the conformist suburban sprawl financing their personal versions of the dream on hire purchase.”

“Then, an invitation arrived in my inbox: BE A CENSUS TAKER…At $25 an hour, the work was a potential lifeline. As a journalist, I was intrigued by the possibility of observing the enterprise—’the federal government’s largest and most complex peacetime operation,’ according to the National Research Council—up close. How, I wondered, could the government safely send hundreds of thousands of people to knock on doors across the country in the midst of a pandemic?”

“And so these books, with their gauzily painted or starkly heraldic covers, their comical abundance of pages published for the delight of furtive young boys and girls curled up reading by themselves in bookstore corners, waiting eagerly for their authors to publish the next installment (picture me here one more time, a child again, sleepy-eyed and confused, surrounded by the battered paperbacks and hardcovers I’ve lugged to every house and apartment I ever lived in) became…this. The biggest and most expensive business in all of television.”

“Nawabshah, home to more than a million people, has the untidy, nondescript feel of just about any other small Pakistani city: tangled power lines, tacky roundabouts, squat buildings. It has one consistent claim to national fame, however: its dry, punishing heat, the suffering of which residents flaunt with pride and masochistic smugness.”

The children will never recover from what happened inside a D.C. apartment. The owner of the illegal gun faces far less serious consequences.

“Why does biryani mean so much to so many people on the Indian subcontinent? The answers may be found on the streets of one of the world’s food capitals: Karachi.”

“As climate disasters increase, a last-gasp FEMA camp for wildfire survivors tests the government’s obligation to the displaced.”

“When you buy into the myth of the singular genius, it becomes unseemly that a brilliant writer might need an equal partner in an audio producer to coherently package and adapt their thoughts for a new medium. It’s why we experience a twinge of distaste when we find out a prominent figure worked with a ghostwriter on their memoir; if a person is notable or exceptional in one respect, they must be in all ways.”