The author examines his closest relationships.

On leaving New York for Portland.

In 1968, the author revisits remote British Columbia, which he traveled two years earlier.

A radical new treatment for auditory hallucinations.

On the ground with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

What happens when top universities focus on careers rather than minds.

A pre-recession essay on becoming extremely wealthy.

A speech on the value of being alone with your thoughts, delivered to the plebe class at West Point.

A flurry of interactions in a doctor's office hint to varieties of unnamed medical problems and domestic unhappiness.

"Why wasn’t the doctor coming out? I could give her a ride, but not to another state, not to Wheeling, West Virginia. Beyond the glass doors, a vacuum started loudly. Suddenly, the woman who’d drawn my blood walked quickly past us, tears streaming, mouth tight, clutching a pink piece of paper."

Afternoons with Altman and Allen.

For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were also long empty spells. I tried to write some fiction and couldn’t, tried to read and could—but only for so long. I ended up going to the movies.

On witnessing the transformation of George W. Bush over 25 years.

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

After the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Ring Lardner, America’s first great sportswriter, walked away from the game.

The shooting death of the last wild Passenger Pigeon, atomic energy, mastodon watering holes, and other footnotes in Ohio history.

A voyage to North Sentinel island, home to one of the last entirely isolated populations on Earth.

Night raids by the “Hash Monster” and other perils facing American soldiers at a remote base in the wilderness of the Paktya Province as they attempt to turn over power to the Afghan Army.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.