Longreads

My girlfriend argued no man could be treated by a female therapist because complications due to sexual desire would impede every discussion One night less than two years ago, intoxicated on cheap…

Iannis Xenakis: Formalized Music Iannis Xenakis: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (PDF) English French …

I WALK into the operating theatre feeling vulnerable in a draughty gown and surgical stockings. Two anaesthetists in green scrubs tell me to stash my belongings under the trolley and lie down. "Can…

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Marylands Carroll County because he had…

More than 30 years after his death, Elvis Presley has been reduced to the shorthand of iconography. Ray Connolly remembers meeting the man ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine,…

In the course of a few hapless days, Deley repeatedly stumbled over the names of star athletes ("the Honourable Leo Usain Bolt") and his trackside commentators. He called Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee "the fastest man on no legs." He invented events ("the men's 100-metre hurdles"), forgot commercial breaks, missed links, paused for long moments to consult his script, corrected himself endlessly, asked his studio guest – the four-times Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter, Michael Johnson – whether he was a pole vaulter, and concluded one broadcast with the memorable sign-off: "So we have a gloriously sunny day here in the studio. We've seen some action this morning as well. Jessica Ennis. Good night."

My mother died twenty years ago this month—on June 19, 1991. At least, that’s the date I observe. It was on the 19th that she gathered the family together and took a lethal dose of Seconal to end her life after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. To allow her to die as she wished, we had to lie, and cheat, and break the law, and that behavior was antithetical to the way we had and have lived. It was bizarre that being a party to my mother’s getting the Seconal would be like helping a junkie get heroin, when all she wanted was to die at home, with us beside her, under what she held to be optimal conditions.

Spy novels embrace clichés—the double agent, the bomb-rigged briefcase—and “Assassin of Secrets,” published last fall, made a virtue of this tendency, piling one trope…