Why we misread people we do not know, built around the traffic stop that ended with Sandra Bland dead in a cell.
Why underdogs win more often than the odds allow, from a girls' basketball full-court press to dyslexic chief executives.
Nineteen New Yorker pieces, from Cesar Millan reading dogs to why there are dozens of mustards and only one ketchup.
Snap judgement: the art historians who saw a fake kouros in two seconds, and the police shooting that shows when two seconds are not enough.
The last weeks before Dune opens: the Emperor hands Arrakis to House Atreides and Paul turns fifteen.
Jessica is recalled to the Sisterhood on Wallach IX, and Leto and Paul are left with the rebellion and a narcotic grown on Caladan.
Leto Atreides at home a year before Arrakis, facing a rebel movement called the Noble Commonwealth.
After Paul walks into the desert: Jessica and Alia hold Arrakis together while Bronso of Ix writes pamphlets against the Atreides myth.
Alternates between Paul's twelve-year jihad after Dune, fought across the galaxy in his name, and his boyhood on Caladan.
The pursuers are finally named and the cycle is closed, on the outline Brian Herbert found in his father's safe deposit boxes.
Picks up the cliffhanger Frank Herbert left in 1985: the no-ship runs from an enemy the Bene Gesserit cannot name, with a hold full of gholas.
A city whose happiness depends on one child kept in a cellar, and the few citizens who leave rather than accept the terms.
A village gathers on a June morning for the annual draw; the New Yorker lost subscribers over what the draw is for.
A universe of hexagonal galleries holding every possible 410-page book, nearly all of them gibberish.
Seven contradictory accounts of one killing in a bamboo grove, the dead man's included; the source of Rashomon.
An officer demonstrates the machine that writes a condemned man's sentence into his back over twelve hours.
A man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.
A Dublin party, a song heard on the stairs, and a husband learning about the boy his wife loved first; the last story in Dubliners.
She sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch; he sells the watch to buy her combs for her hair.
Three wishes on a mummified paw, and the knocking at the door after the second one.
Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.
A woman shut in a nursery for a rest cure starts reading the wallpaper and finds a figure creeping behind the pattern.
A gilded statue and a swallow give away his gold leaf and his sapphire eyes to the poor, and both are thrown out.
A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.
A clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for one ball, loses it, and spends ten years paying off the replacement.
A Wall Street copyist answers every instruction with "I would prefer not to" and stops doing anything at all.
A murderer insists on his own sanity while the old man's heartbeat gets louder under the floorboards.
A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.
A mermaid trades her voice for legs that hurt at every step, and does not get the prince; Andersen's ending is not the film's.
Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.
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