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[Sci-fi, Fiction] A man comes home from a war transformed: “Her husband’s hands came home on a Friday. Rebecca had received word of the attack, which had claimed the lives of seven other soldiers in his unit and reduced three others to similar, minimal fractions of themselves: One man missing above the waist, another missing […]

An American’s eyewitness account of the 1996 rocket accident at China’s Xichang spaceport, which killed six people and injured 57: “What Campbell witnessed over the next few days has haunted him ever since. Like most veterans of the Intelsat-708 launch, he hasn’t discussed the event in public. I got to know him while gathering material […]

A 29-year-old combat veteran returns home, then decides to try to walk on as a kicker for Wyoming: “Noble took a job for his uncle’s hay-brokerage company, throwing bales from trucks into the barn lofts of thoroughbred horse farms, sometimes 720 of them a day. He told the stories of walking dusty streets and climbing […]

A look at the families who are not just affected by returning veterans, but display similar symptons: “Brannan and Katie’s teacher have conferenced about Katie’s behavior many times. Brannan’s not surprised she’s picked up overreacting and yelling—you don’t have to be at the Vines residence for too long to hear Caleb hollering from his room, […]

Colonel James S. Ketchum oversaw years of research into new methods of chemical warfare—which included testing on U.S. soldiers: “Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and […]

An Iraq war veteran becomes blind during combat and learns how to live on: “When the doctors told him the blindness was irreversible, he felt a rage and despair that made him feel like his head would explode. “Castro began therapy a week after waking up, and he only halfheartedly endured the rehab sessions with […]

The takeover of San Francisco by tech companies prompts some soul-searching by Talbot, a longtime resident and veteran of the first dotcom boom as founder of Salon.com: “One recent Friday evening, a single mother named Fufkin Vollmayer found herself at a Shabbat service started by two young Jews who work in the tech sector. The […]

A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race: “I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about […]

[Fiction] A philandering husband’s next phase in life: “Horace and Loneese Perkins—one child, one grandchild—lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens at 1202 Thirteenth Street NW. They moved there in 1977, the year they celebrated forty years of marriage, the year they […]

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career: “Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild […]