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Something north of a hundred and fifty thousand books were published in 2009. That number daunted me, so I got to thinking of a year, three centuries ago, when, in all of the British mainland colonies, only thirty-one books were printed (if you discount a...

Edmund Lester Pearson, a librarian and sometime hoax-artist who spent most of his career at the New York Public Library, wrote true-crime stories for The New Yorker from 1933 to 1937. He wasn’t the first person to write about murder in the magazine and he...

I’ve got a piece in this week’s magazine about scientific management, and the work of the industrial engineers Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who wanted to systematize work, but in different ways. Taylor wanted workers to put a...

Weary of the one-hundred-day-a-palooza? Not every span of one hundred days is as arbitrary as this one. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln signed a document called the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that he would free every slave held in...

Earlier this week, Jill Lepore helped our readers solve a cryptogram by Edgar Allan Poe, whom she writes about this week in the magazine. Every code, Poe might have said, needs a coda: a few months after this business with the cryptogram, Poe left Graham...

April 21, 2009 Yesterday, Jill Lepore provided a cryptogram created by Edgar Allan Poe as a contest for readers of Graham's Magazine. Here, she talks about the solution. One reader—a man from Mississippi named Richard Bolton--did write to Poe with the...

APRIL 20, 2009 This week in the magazine, Jill Lepore considers some of the more fascinating aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s character, like his penchant for puzzles. Here, she offers our readers a chance to take on the (self-declared) master cryptographer...

The time has come “to choose our better history,” our new president said in his inaugural address. There were a few different histories told today. CNN commentators, trying to explain the three-fifths clause, and William Bennett, nattering on about the...