Editor’s Pick

The writer reflects on a 1987 tragedy that forever changed the lives of the sisters of Ole Miss’s Chi Omega sorority: “In my mother’s house I keep a packet of newspaper stories, yellowed relics. And when I look at them I feel no time has passed. I am back in the Chi O house, living […]

Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next: “John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed […]

A man attempts to track down his middle school teacher and offer a long-overdue apology: “Only by chance was I curious enough about the subject line — ‘Customer Feedback’ — to open the email from a man named Larry Israelson. “You published an item involving retired teacher James Atteberry and the CASA program. Mr. Atteberry […]

Domestic violence homicides in Maryland have dropped by 40 percent since 2007—and its success is attributed to a simple new approach to helping victims: “A few years after moving to Johns Hopkins in 1993, Campbell and a team of researchers began studying domestic violence murders in Maryland. Their work, which was published in 2002, sought […]

[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5: “My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when […]

How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered: “But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables […]

Researchers are exploring whether certain drugs can help patients cope with fear of death. Pam Sakuda, who was given 6 to 14 months to live, was administered psilocybin—an active component of magic mushrooms: “Sakuda brought a few pictures of loved ones, which, Grob recalled, she clutched in her hands as she lay back on the […]

[Fiction] [Not single-page] Mail-order brides on a journey across the ocean: “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were […]

The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals: “Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating […]

[Fiction] A born-again adolescent takes a joyride with his wandering uncle: “My parents and I had been waiting for Uncle Skillet to show up for five hours, wasting an entire Saturday as far as I was concerned, and not just any old Saturday but a glorious early summer one of God’s pure sunshine and chirping […]