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In an excerpt from his new book The Everything Store, Brad Stone explores how Jeff Bezos turned Amazon into an online retailing giant—and tracks down Bezos’s biological father: “I found Ted Jorgensen, Jeff Bezos’s biological father, behind the counter of his bike shop in late 2012. I’d considered a number of ways he might react […]

On Teddy Roosevelt’s early life as an author, and the making of his book The Naval War of 1812: “What Roosevelt sheepishly omits is that he started working on the book just after Thanksgiving as a way to cope with a broken heart. He’d fallen head over heels for Alice Hathaway Lee, a golden-haired girl […]

The writer on her parents’ interracial marriage during the Civil Rights movement: “She remembered only a time when a taxi driver refused to pick them up. They were with her parents, and my grandfather was outraged by the slight. A Jewish Ukrainian immigrant, my grandfather held high ideals of justice in his adopted land. He […]

“I feel dizzy, exalted: recognized.” Terry Castle begins to make peace with her mother and finds joy in the experience of being married in a country where it is finally legal: “But I’m nearly sixty and there’s something to be said for advancing senescence. Maybe things don’t hurt quite as much? (Blakey just came in […]

A look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh. The painter was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Paris weeks before he died of a self-inflicted gun wound: “Vincent was thirty-seven now, an old thirty-seven. After his attacks during the last eighteen months, he had given up on many cherished dreams. In particular, he […]

Buoyed by marriage equality victories on the coasts, same-sex couples are fighting for equality rights in the South: “Not only are gay couples in Mississippi not allowed to marry, they cannot legally adopt — even though a quarter of same-sex couples here are raising children together, the highest percentage of any state, according to the […]

Novelist Robert Boswell tells the story of how he met his wife, the author Antonya Nelson, and uses the story to explore how fiction is crafted: “Why are we drawn to stories about people falling in love? There are likely a host of reasons, but here’s a good one: marriage, when observed from a place […]

His pregnant girlfriend’s father had abandoned her and her mother when she was young, and the writer is determined to prove to them that he’ll be a different kind of man and father: “When Kenyatta was 2, her father walked out on his family. He never returned, but his ghost walks with Kenyatta and Camille, […]