Wisława Szymborska

The poet Wisława Szymborska was a 16-year-old in Krakow, Poland, when Germany invaded her country in 1939. Everything changed after that: The Nazis banned secondary schools and universities, so she had to finish high school illegally in secret classes. Eventually, after the war, she went to university—and ultimately won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She kept writing about the long trail of violence through the centuries, and the stories we tell about that violence in hindsight.

In “On Statistics,” Wisława Szymborska takes the language of data, with its air of easy certainty, and uses it to measure some of the messiest, most complex aspects of human nature. The result is absurd, and it underscores how ill-equipped those quantitative measurements are for answering the biggest questions in life.