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Tracing a years-long Internet hoax back to its creator, a 22-year-old woman in Ohio: “On the evening of May 13, Mother’s Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the […]

A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina: “It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for […]

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: “Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, […]

[Fiction] “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.” For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would […]

Soon after he arrived in the United States—by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity—Wilhelm Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about […]

My mother died twenty years ago this month—on June 19, 1991. At least, that’s the date I observe. It was on the 19th that she gathered the family together and took a lethal dose of Seconal to end her life after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. To allow her to die as she wished, […]

Rock music in 2011 is not quite what it was in the mid-1960s. For one thing, it is full of challenging coincidences, such as the one reported by Pete Townshend in a recent e-mail. “I was supposed to be sailing in the St Barth’s Bucket Race on March 24th,” he wrote. That’s right: the writer […]

Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle.