Pain and grief are among our most private, isolating experiences.
The author’s interpretive framework truncates the narrative by forcing her to see thick cultural issues only through the lens of social class.
The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Given that most Americans now assume that children are priceless and fragile, it is no surprise that many have striven to remove all risks they might face.
Poverty research has become caught up in a paradox of its own making—of diminishing insight into the problem of poverty amid more data about the poor.
A human person is a historical being, in whom the past remains immanent in the present, and whom the wear and tear of time enhances rather than diminishes.
A grotesque and caricatured version of Simone Weil undermines an otherwise good book.
The ideal mother, as countless novelists have known, is a dead one.
How are we ethically to evaluate the practice of getting stoned?
If being sensible was no virtue to my father, being fantastic was just as bad.
When you bring children into being, you give them the gift of life, but you also impose on them these terrible costs.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
The COVID crisis has changed our perceptions of assisted living communities, perhaps permanently.
A lesson in what it takes to be a father, and why a kid might want to have one.
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.
What haunted Edmund was a fear of being second best.