A married father of two tracks down his free-living doppelgänger, a musician who has avoided responsibility at every turn, to see who’s happier.

The author muses on the markers we use to identify ourselves and other people — from names to photographs to fingerprints.

A childhood spent with the oboe.

An advertising copywriter adjusts to daily life in Paris, and works in a dysfunctional office.

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person’s responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people’s desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties’ personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk.

Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

On spending six months on the southern coast of Argentina with the “Jane Goodall of penguins” and several hundred of her research subjects.

On a Victorian-era murder case, and the novel it inspired.

On fashion, gender, a finding oneself in a pair of drop-crotch pants.

On singer-songwriters Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks.

I get the sense that the labels’ attitude toward these guys wasn’t altogether different from a parent’s attitude toward gifted children: Get them through the system, but make sure to give them a clean little corner to doodle in and pat them on the head when they show you what they’ve done, whether you understand it or not.

The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:

It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.

A young man’s personal account of undergoing “ex-gay treatment.”

On living alone, which more people are doing today than ever before.

A writer’s trip home to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the racetrack inextricably linked with the histories of his family and his hometown.