SAMUEL ADAMS delivered what may count as the most remarkable second act in American life. It was all the more confounding after the first: he was a perfect failure until middle age. He found his footing at forty-one, when, over a dozen years, he proceeded to answer to Thomas Jefferson’s description of him as “truly […]
The sounds. The rhythms. The smells. When I was coming up, the kitchen gave me life. But, cousins, I wasn’t really allowed to cook as a kid. My mom and grandma, and in fact everyone I knew on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, expected children to do children’s things. The kitchen was no place […]
I have come a long way to be here. The cabin sits at the edge of the wood. Constructed from hand-split logs and timbers, it’s partially hidden by tall, majestic trees and dense foliage. Upon reaching the door, I look around and realize it has an inspiring, beautiful view of the valley and mountains beyond. […]
You know that person in your life who makes you feel seen? That person who is somehow a witness to all that unfolds? That person who knows—really knows—what is happening to you and what you’re going through, without anything having to be said? For me, that person is Tom Felton. As you’ll read in this […]
When I look at these photographs of Mrs. Kennedy as we traveled through Europe and Asia and South America, I realize now what a privilege it was to have been part of those private, joyful moments she experienced. There we were, all over the globe, in some of the most exotic countries in the world, […]
In November 2017, I watched my friend Sam P. die because his cells had rebelled against his body. Sam had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma in the spring of 2016. The cancer had first appeared as a coin-shaped mole, purple-black with a halolike aureole, near his cheek. His mother, Clara, a painter, had first […]
hat do you need me to say?” It was May 5, 2016, two days after the Republican primary in Indiana. I sat in the back of a yellow taxicab as it rolled down Fifth Avenue, my computer open on my lap and a phone held to my ear. The likely Republican nominee for president was […]
Jack Reacher arrived in Gerrardsville, Colorado, mid-morning on a Monday, two days before the Minerva guys met in secret for the third time. He had hitched a ride in a truck that was delivering alfalfa bales to a farm south of the town so he covered the final mile on foot. It was a pleasant […]
THE HISTORY OF Westeros stretches back thousands of years, but the period in which House Targaryen unified the various realms into the Seven Kingdoms as we know them covers less than three hundred. The history of the family goes back further than that, however, to its beginnings in the Freehold of Valyria. The Targaryens were […]
This then would be Chicago in the winter of the last year of her life. In a week’s time she would return to Stella Maris and from there wander away into the bleak Wisconsin woods. The Thalidomide Kid found her in a roominghouse on Clark Street. Near North Side. He knocked at the door. Unusual […]
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it. On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good […]
It was every father’s nightmare. Your fourteen-year-old daughter, your little girl, being sexually assaulted at school. In the girls’ bathroom. By a boy wearing a skirt. Horrific. But in any sane environment, the consequences would have been swift. The boy would have been prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. The criminal justice system would have worked, if […]