On the morning of 16 November 1973, Buddhist monks carried a body down to Muir Beach and burned it on a wood pyre. The body belonged to Alan Watts, dead at 58 after years of heavy drinking that his friends had watched with growing alarm.
In the opening of the book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Didion writes: Life changes fast.Life changes in the…
The beautiful ones The 8 mice arrived on July 9, 1968 and got dropped into a steel enclosure at the…
Article summary Your brain constructs emotions the way an improvising chef builds a dish. Not by following a recipe written…
If Isabel Allende’s office needs painting, it gets done by January 7. After that, the door stays shut. She has…
A groom let himself into the writing room with a cup of coffee. He had been paid £5 a year…
When a Roman general won a major battle, the senate awarded him a triumphus. A triumphus was a massive public…
On October 30, 1935, the Boeing Model 299 lifted off the runway at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, climbed to…
What a lonely monkey, a stuffed orangutan and 70 years of science tell us about being human. A small monkey…
I was five years old, standing in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom, watching. She was at the mirror doing…