To a firefighter who is inside one, a fire creates as much darkness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe everything in pitch black. Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell did not fight fires so much as he groped through and...
Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.” Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little...
Twenty-five years after 9/11, analysts can’t decide whether the terrorist organization got what it wanted. Since September 11, 2001, al‑qaeda has pulled off exactly one fatal attack inside the United States. If you remember the details of that...
Why I lost faith in academia
Scientists are only just beginning to understand their secrets. “¡Mire! ” My guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering...
Why are so few young people finding love?
A neuroscientist dares to argue that old-fashioned psychoanalysis holds the key to curing mental illness. To announce that you are embarking on a course of psychoanalytic training today is tantamount, in many quarters, to admitting...
Richard Russo is America’s portraitist of left-behind people in hollowed-out towns. “I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his...
Gay Jamaican men struggle for survival in Marlon James’s new novel. For what it’s worth, I think he is protesting too much. When these comments came up again during the 2024 presidential campaign, my sister was a childless cat lady, a fan...