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He grew up the middle of three brothers. By his 25th birthday, he was the only one left. Brett, the youngest, killed himself in December 2005, two months before he turned 20. His depression could appear with a stunning swiftness. On that final night, he talked of forgiveness and the future. And then, like the […]

Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves. In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy. “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, which was published in 1952, advised readers that techniques […]

It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans délire” – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to […]

August in Havana is a mounting wave of heat—so consuming, the sun so piercing, it can warp your sense of reason. Tempt you to surrender. Make you flirt with insanity. The pained faces around you are covered in grimy sweat, a haze of resignation in the eyes. Here or there a woman fans herself, perhaps […]

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they’re about to do it again

Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now

What the Great Depression did to culture.

Nearly 80 years ago, on Capitol Hill, Ferdinand Pecora forced J. P. Morgan Jr. and other “banksters” to reveal the corruption that had fueled the Great Depression—bringing shame on the financial industry and resulting in new laws to curb abuses. The author looks back at the Pecora Commission hearings, and asks why there is no […]

Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label?