When I was a young reporter, I envied my elders’ ability to write obituaries of famous people. Having the last word on someone renowned seemed to me like high-end journalism, especially when it ...

Where did I find affirmation in a book so enamored of the abyss? (Images of dark, empty spaces, reservoirs of nonbeing, fill the text: “cavern,” “breach,” “void,” “wound.”) Nor am I alone: generations ...

When each day brings more news than we are used to seeing in a week, and the kind of news that only the most catastrophic imagination can accommodate, we find ourselves talking about the Reichstag ...

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In the mid-Nineties, I spent about eighteen months working as an editor for the British edition of a new magazine called Wired, which had been founded in San Francisco as a sort of house journal of ...

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies, by Paul Fischer. Simon and Schuster. 416 pages. $28.99. On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set ...

EXT. 8TH STREET—LATE AFTERNOON (C. 1959). CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a young man, late teens, intently walking west on a busy Greenwich Village thoroughfare. Under one arm, he’s ...

I went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005 because I’d won a writing prize, and with that prize came an invitation to a luncheon and awards ceremony. Each honoree was allowed to bring ...

I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, ...

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my ...

Alice James: A Biography, by Jean Strouse. Picador. 416 pages. $20. Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 336 pages. $32. In 2001, the ...