You finish a book. You feel accomplished. Three weeks later, someone asks what it was about and you find yourself reaching for words that don't quite come, a vague impression of the main argument, a couple of scenes, a feeling you can't reconstruct. This was my reading life for ...Read More
I am thirty-eight and I realized something last month that I have not, on close examination, been able to put down since. The realization arrived in a small specific moment, in the way these realizations tend to, and the moment was almost entirely unremarkable from outside. I was ...Read More
When Harriet Doerr finished reading her work to the other students in Stanford's Stegner creative writing program, the room went silent. She was seventy, decades older than the rest of the workshop, and she assumed the silence meant they hated it. They hurried to tell her it was ...Read More
There is a particular cognitive style that turns out, on the available empirical research, to be one of the more reliable predictors of accurate judgment across a wide range of tasks. The style is not, on close examination, the one the wider culture has been calibrated to admire. ...Read More
In upper middle class families, money is the most visible thing in the room and the least discussed. The renovated kitchen, the second car, the school fees paid without flinching, the dental work that nobody jokes about — all of it sits in plain view. But the conversation ...Read More
The disappearance rarely looks like leaving. It looks like a man who still comes home, still eats dinner, still answers when spoken to, but who has somehow become less present in the room than the furniture. By the time the relationship ends, the people closest to him will often ...Read More