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A writer looks back on her costly mistakes—blowing a generous book advance while pursuing a relationship with a married man: “I was 27 the year my first novel sold for half a million dollars. During the three years I spent writing the book, I’d gotten by on next to nothing, eating ramen noodles for dinner […]

On the authenticity of online friendships: “When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two […]

Author Ann Patchett on opening an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tenn. at a time when brick and mortar bookstores are considered dead: “I was starting to understand the role that the interviews would play in that success. In my 30s, I had paid my rent by writing for fashion magazines. I found Elle to be […]

[Not single-page] In the fall of 1993, Trevell Coleman, a former rapper part of Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy crew, shot a man and fled. Haunted by the incident, Coleman turns himself in to the police nearly two decades later: “Several years after they got married, he told her that he’d fired a gun at a […]

A personal history of joining, and leaving, the Mormon Church: “When I meet with the first two landlords in Beverly Hills, they’ve already seen my credit files and don’t seem to want to know much more about me other than why I’m standing on their property. At my third stop, I speak into an intercom […]

An eight-year-old autistic boy disappears into a densely forested park in Virginia for five days. The frantic search to find a child who doesn’t understand he’s in danger: “Because of his autism, Robert probably didn’t know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from […]

2012 Pulitzer Prize winner: A woman testifies about her rape and the rape and murder of her partner: “She understood, sitting up there on the witness stand, why people might need to imagine her window coverings. But this is not what the survivor of the South Park rapes and murder had come to talk about. […]

Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin: “Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry […]

A group of teenagers in a small town mysteriously fall ill, suffering from uncontrollable twitching. Was the cause environmental, or psychological? “Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question […]

A moment-by-moment reconstruction of last year’s U.S. embassy attack in Kabul: “In an image that remained strangely fixed in her mind afterward, Howell watched as he slowly peeled the skin off. As he was peeling off the very last bit, there came a heart-stopping screech and then the bang and shock of an impact. Something […]