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Nora Ephron’s son Jacob on his mother’s last days, and the play she was working on that helped her understand her own sickness and impending death: “In the play my mother wrote, there’s a scene toward the end, in which McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer, then […]

A college football star learns about the death of his grandmother and girlfriend on the same day and has inspirational stories written about him by major media outlets. But there’s a problem: His girlfriend never existed: “There was no Lennay Kekua. Lennay Kekua did not meet Manti Te’o after the Stanford game in 2009. Lennay […]

Joke-telling as a muscle: “Since Richard Pryor, at least, confession has been prized in stand-up, and this is as true today as ever. The biggest stand-up story of 2012 came this summer, when the comedian Tig Notaro took a Los Angeles stage and wrung laughs from a saga of personal misery that included the sudden […]

On teaching writing to children at a Houston cancer center. Featured in The Best American Essays 2012: “The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases […]

A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable: “Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in […]

Undying hope from a city’s football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear: “For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and […]

The story of a property-line feud between two families in North Georgia: “The main bridge between the families was the fast friendship of Jewell Crane’s father and Lewis Dempsey’s father. The old men agreed that neighbors should talk and cooperate. Thus, when it came time in the early 1980s to fence off the southern part […]

A physician relates his experience of watching his daughter die of cancer: “A Greek aphorism warns, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ A calamity that I hoped/presumed never would occur now seems likely – I am going to outlive one of my children. I am very unhappy, and my wife asks if we […]

A man terminally ill with cancer and his friendship with a hospice worker: “Andres was in his brother’s living room on the Northside last August as he told his story. A small group of family and friends was his audience. No one flinched as he covered the tougher parts – everyone there knew the story. […]