“Mary Mazur, 61, shrank into the blankets, muttering into the leaves, whispering to her only friend.” An Instagram essay by Jeff Sharlet.
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Interview: Former ‘Matilda’ Star Mara Wilson on Leaving Hollywood and Becoming a Writer
“It’s very hard to be a perfectionist growing up in the film world. It reinforces all of your worst fears about perfection and doing things right.”
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. The Day I Started Lying to Ruth Peter B. Bach | New York Magazine | May 6, 2014 | 24 minutes (6,012 […]
Joe McGinniss: 1942-2014
Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings. Now he was starting […]
What It’s Like to Have Hypochondria
In a piece for Psychology Today, a man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder.
Roger Ebert's Love Story
“How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and […]
Regulating the $1.5 Billion E-Cigarette Industry
Even without the combustion, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor that narrows blood vessels and drives up blood pressure. Doing that a dozen times a day is less bad than getting lung cancer, but it’s still not great. Besides, there is no study on what inhaling those “generally recognized as safe” compounds might do to your lungs […]
On Grieving: ‘If you think you’re doing okay, then you’re doing okay’
“Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience ‘chronic’ and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness […]
“In the days before this Halloween, it was especially hard for me to avoid interpreting its elements too bluntly. If you have cancer, if you’ve had it for a while, at some point you start really seeing all those skulls and skeletons and Styrofoam headstones, all those children in hooded capes, bearing scythes on their […]
A Tale of Two Drugs
A cancer drug offers no obvious advantages over an alternative drug, but is also twice as expensive. Why? The writer looks at how drug companies determine prices: “Because of medical insurance, co-pay reductions, and expanded access programs for the uninsured, relatively few Americans pay more than a few thousand dollars per year for even the […]

