Longreads

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in…

LAURIE WINER on the dismantling of a once great newspaper.James OSheaThe Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers PublicAffairs Books,…

Five nights ago, a prosecutor pal a new mom who spends her days tracking terrorists and her nights trying not to think about them, sent me a link to the indictment of Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of…

This is the debut of a regular feature: a collection of the weeks best long-form journalism published in The Times, as selected by our editors. We will also include one pick from The Timess archives.…

My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

The Emperors New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper)

What is going on here? Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?

Brown, photographed at his home in California on May 23.(Photo: Dan Winters) AIDS is a disease of staggering numbers, of tragically recursive devastation. Since the first diagnosis, 30…