Where Death Lies
Each year, the Japanese government expects dozens of people to die from eating ill-prepared blowfish, and yet the dish remains a delicacy.
psychology
A collection of 68 issues
In Her Own Skin
A longtime leader of New York’s performance art world, Martha Wilson’s photographs exist as proof of her experiments with multiple identities.
IH8YRST8
Studying drivers across the country for signs of license-plate prejudice—or, why everyone loves Vermont drivers and hates Texans.
Life Before Death
If you had to choose between the life of a loved one or the survival of a dozen other people, would you be capable of a rational decision?
The Wayback Machine
How nostalgia works and why social media may destroy it altogether, or restore it to its original purpose.
Hunting the Hound
A lifelong phobia is the result of a terrifying childhood incident. But the real culprit may be Arthur Conan Doyle.
Anything but Nothing
After a lifetime of mental illness, one woman opts to try electroconvulsive therapy. She discusses her decision with her sister.
Our Imaginary Brother Only Watches PBS
How one family schemed to be the best TV-watchers in America.
The Downstairs Gays
Social media makes it easy to virtually tour our neighbors’ homes—and really, their entire lives. The hard part: finding the clear divide between entertainment and cyberstalking.
How the Other Half Shares
When the media talks about social media, it’s always about young, white Americans. We spoke to a wider sample—including a sex worker, a pastor’s wife, a rapper—to see why people do what they do online.
The Low Road
Not everyone who breaks your heart is a monster. And not everyone who wounds you deserves to be wounded in return.
Our Dino Love Will Never Die
Dinosaurs haven’t been super-popular for 65 million years—it only feels that way. Fans and experts explain our obsession with dead monsters.
Ars Erotica
What one woman labels kinky, another person calls a crime against cake. Offering a taxonomy of erotic fixations.
When a Country Is Not a Country
In the last 25 years, more than two dozen new countries have been recognized by the international community. But secession isn’t easy, as Somaliland’s success story proves.
The Books
A couple’s decision to combine bookshelves supplies a series of revelations.
The End Isn't the End
When insomnia and technological convenience collide, a lifetime of binge reading reaches its full potential.
Admirable Restraint
Understatement can help us cope with disaster. But in the case of Paul McCartney, a little doesn’t always go a long way.
The Combination Lock Test
A man dies, leaving behind, among other things, a combination lock. Opening it may just prove the existence of the afterlife.
Chicago Fear
Life in a city, including its dangers, can be evaluated in a thousand ways. But dangerous and scary are different adjectives, and different measurements. Especially after a man appears below your stairs.
The Iron in Man
How a book, booze, and a guilty hangover brought an admittedly non-athletic man to the starting line, and what happened next.
Summer Into Fall
New clothes, AP classes, middle-aged angst. A New York City mom reflects on being pulverized by the first day of school.
Water From Elephants
Humans have kept elephants for thousands of years, longer than we've domesticated chickens. Yet the great animals’ capacity to cry for freedom comes as a shock.
King Lear With Sheep
London traffic, bladder control, and a runaway Cordelia challenge a mostly wool production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
Radio Maria
A new series where we ask a novelist to eat in a restaurant, then write us something that meets two criteria: 1) it is a restaurant review; 2) it is not a restaurant review.
Mating Habits of the Asterisk
Living out of a van, without an address to pin you down, can be blissful and carefree, and occasionally miserable. But the same goes for love.
The Übersinner
Reddit's “Ask Me Anything” interviews—edited for the seven deadly sins—provide an Idolatry of Self so big, it produces Zen koans.
Game Face
Even someone who writes erotica for a living has to find ways to get through moments of shame.
Let It Stop
Disney’s “Frozen” juggernaut has been criticized for “sexy walking.” But the roots of what’s wrong lie in Midwestern pageants, not hip-hop videos.
Glad I’m Not You
The instinct to applaud boot-strapping and the comeback kid is as American as apple pie. So why does schadenfreude make us feel so good?
The Cello Courier
After a death in the family, a precious musical instrument must be transported a thousand-plus miles. Should it break, a lot more is at stake than just music.
Crime Reported
Lawbreaking occurs, a man calls for help, the police detain an endless lineup of men. Sometimes fraud comes as no surprise.
Who Goes There
The Heartbleed Bug exposed a well-known secret: Passwords suck. But that’s really nothing new—just ask the Romans. Explaining the password’s past and future.
What Doesn’t Kill You Doesn’t Kill You
A visit to a bear sanctuary could cure you of your bear phobia. Or it could turn your fear into a full-blown obsession.
The Illuminated
A family that relies on the satisfactions of the logical—calculus, physics, chemistry—finds itself haunted by ghosts.
A Man Enough
Eventually a man who’s always in motion, always fixing something, will stop. Decline of the patriarch reveals an entire family’s vulnerability.
Read It Again, Dad
Good books are frequently credited with being worth reading twice. But when was the last time anyone had time for that?
Gentlemen, Formerly
A gentleman in 1720 could read Greek while mounting a running horse. Today’s gentleman reads GQ in the bathroom. From rapists to stylists, a history of the American gentleman.
No Blanket Left Behind
Across generations, when children can’t find their comfort objects—usually soft toys like blankets or favorite stuffed animals—all hell breaks loose.
The Cyclist’s Dilemma
Afternoons in the big city are terrible. Sunsets are horrifying, nights are long and anxious. Other people have choices, but not you. Then suddenly, a bicycle.
E Pluribus, Gen X
Generation X has always been able to fashion its own best outcome. Now it’s time to take that DIY attitude and fix the nation. Because you know who really won the American Revolution? That’s right: Slackers.
Songs in the Key of Eno
Much to the chagrin of his former 25-year-old self, a man in his forties—with no singing experience outside the shower—joins the village chorus. Terror, learning, and intense joy, all while making Brian Eno proud.
Bad Land
America is full of guns—one gun for every citizen—and Americans often use them to shoot one another. It’s not enough anymore to say we love our guns. The question is: Why do we kill?
I Wish That We Could Both Be There
In 1974, a car hits a seven-year-old boy in central New Jersey. The boy dies. From 2013, a former friend starts to probe the causes, effects, statistics, and consequences.
Clenching the Night Away
A mouth guard can do more than save our enamel from nighttime gnashing. It may also shield us from our daily anxieties.
The Break-Up
Elections once conferred a larger knowledge that made us feel more connected to what’s important. But this cycle’s meaningless content overload has delivered little more a desire to unplug.
The Master and Moviemaking
Once again, we convene our film scholars, plus critic Michelle Orange, to discuss a major movie: “The Master,” by Paul Thomas Anderson—a masterpiece of craftsmanship, or merely an exercise of cinema and violence with no story in the center?
What to Expect When You’re Electing
Small donations comprise more than half of President Obama’s war chest. Small donors, on the other hand, constitute some of the world’s most overwhelmed email recipients. But all that follow-up isn’t just about cash—it’s about subtle changes being made inside your head.
Learning to Talk
When a voiceover artist temporarily loses the use of her primary asset, the struggle back to speaking unearths what's gone unsaid for too long.
Ninety-Nine Bottles of Pee on the Wall
Everyone says they’ve got a book inside, but hundreds of people actually write them—and are preyed upon by scam artists. The greatest story of literary vigilantism ever told.
The Wolf Is Waiting
Imperceptibly and without warning, your pulse accelerates, your mind races, and panic grips your body—for anxiety attack sufferers, every day is a case in survival. A journey to the wild to confront the fear.
The Heretic
For decades, the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD. But for one longtime, elite researcher, the promise of mind-blowing revelations was just too tempting.
Therapist, Know Thyself
For psychotherapists, maintaining a stable, flawless public image is critical. But when a marriage and family counselor actually goes through a mid-life crisis herself, all bets are off and here come the tattoos, affairs, and professional infidelities.
From the Files of the Dream Police
They’re waiting for you. They’re looking for you. Every single night they’re on duty, ready to drive you insane. Stories from the blotter of the men inside your brain.
The Storm Comes Around
Tornado season is a distant concept for most people. For some, it’s a scary but known part of life. Then there’s what happens when one of the South’s deadliest storms in history destroys your house.
Come as You Are
To be a male clothing wearer in the early 21st century, you must do what men do, and wear trousers, whether or not the style fits you. Lessons in breaking through fashion anxiety to find yourself—in a pair of Comme des Garçons drop-crotch pants.
Boots March on Bolotnaya Square
This winter, a burgeoning protest movement laid its cornerstone in a former swamp and up grew hope. Our correspondent talks to protesters, editors, commentators, and Kremlin-watchers in anticipation of this weekend's election and what comes next.
How to Paint an Oak Tree
A man who spent three years painting the same English tree repeatedly—in all weather, day and night—explains how exactly, and why.
Marriage, Israeli Style
For Israelis of a certain age, marriage beckons. But in this cradle of so many religions, a tangle of ancient rules and modern laws makes things surprisingly complicated.
Your Third Nipple
All your life, you thought you just had an odd-looking little mole. From 2011, what it’s like when a doctor says that you belong in the ranks of Marky Mark, centuries of witches, and Krusty the Clown.
Where the Choices Are Endless
After a childhood in the country, awaking as a freshman in a college town, where the inhabitants are willing and strange.
Six and a Half Billion People Are Absolutely Right
The N.F.L. is corrupt, baseball's a distant dream, and March Madness is only one month long. Here's why any true sports fan watches soccer.
Michael Ondaatje
Our man in Boston talks to Michael Ondaatje about why he writes novels, how he measures satisfaction, and when fiction can succeed by operating like poetry.
Just Like Heaven
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we answer that eternal question: What happens after we die?
When the Lights Went Out
At 4:15 p.m. on Aug. 14, 2003, tens of millions of people across the Northeast and Midwest U.S. and Ontario were suddenly without power. Our staff and readers tell us what happened next.
Fear of Flying
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we help an airline passenger determine the best day and time to book a flight.
How to Survive a Crush
Two decades after high school days spent yearning to be a part of the “in” crowd, our writer confronts her former dream date, now a best-selling author, and her former self.
Replacing Things Lost
A diagnosis of breast cancer is mind-blowing. A mastectomy can be devastating. But for some women, reconstructive surgery offers a chance for a silver lining.
I Dream in Malcolm Gladwell
A new sport is taking hold, one that involves marshmallows, sticks, and fire.