The New Republic

How a former insurance adjuster claims to have solved the 118-year-old cryptographic mystery of a hidden message in Edward Elgar’s infamous Enigma Variations.

A review of Ayelet Waldman’s new memoir, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life, that also serves as a personal essay about Vaye Watkins’ marijuana use as she weans off anti-depressants (she writes the piece “a little high”), and the tiny dose of LSD she’s got stashed for trying in the future.

In 2004, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying unconscious in front of a restaurant dumpster. The search for his identity would take years.

This personal essay is a year old, but like hope, this story springs eternal. Except in Hollywood, where hope lives and dies in endless meetings where promises are made in a dialect designed to conceal the unpredictability of the film industry while still feeding your hopes.

“No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.”

Dean ponders whether the parallels between Donald Trump’s and Bill Clinton’s histories of alleged sexual misconduct could spark a change in how we respond to perpetrators and victims of sexual assault.

As people start to project what America and the world has in store under Trump, one Muslim scholar details his bleak vision for Muslims and shares his disappointment in the America he believed in.

In an in-depth interview, Sanders offers a candid and passionate assessment of Trump, Clinton, and the future of his movement.

“It was around this time that I first realized something nonwhite writers learn almost by default: for a fiction writer to deny that fiction is in some way political—in the sense of existing in an inherently politicized world—is not only an act of bad faith but a kind of artistic failure. How can we not, as writers, grasp that our own political existence, our own subjectivity, our citizenship, our racial and cultural identities, and the arguments of our time, are not material for our art, that these things are in some sense not all part of one ongoing conversation?”

On the recent proliferation of slavery narratives in popular culture and how Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Underground Railroad, attempts to rewrite the rules.