A father, his dying son, and the quest to make the most profound video game ever.

A doctor who helped pioneer Oregon’s Death With Dignity law receives his own terminal diagnosis.

Morcellation was supposed to make gynecological surgeries easier on women. Instead, is it killing them.

Personalized medicine may one day deliver routine medical miracles. But it wasn’t ready in time for Stephanie Lee.

A treatment for liver cancer gives the writer a fresh perspective on illness – and wellness.

How ESPN anchor Stuart Scott battled cancer.

With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

Immune systems don’t make for clean narratives, even as we expect them to keep us pure.

A woman's life is complicated by a sick lover and a job playing Bigfoot.

"I wait for the woman to relax, watching for the instant when she begins to think: maybe there won’t be a monster after all. I can always tell when this thought arrives. First their posture goes soft. Then their expression changes from confused to relieved to disappointed. More than anything, the ambush is about waiting the customer out. I struggle to stay in character during these quiet moments; it’s tempting to consider my own life and worries, but when the time comes to attack, it will only be believable if I’ve been living with Bigfoot’s loneliness and desires for at least an hour."

Sam Simon made a fortune from The Simpsons. Now, diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is racing to spend it.

The story of Jim Olson and his Tumor Paint dream.

A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer.

The long road to a potential breakthrough.

On the new science of collective behavior.

Stephanie had cancer, until she didn’t.

The story of Nicole Davis, a 25-year-old woman diagnosed with breast cancer six months into her pregnancy.

A father and his daughter’s brain tumor.

The writer contemplates beauty and identity following reconstructive surgery.

There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding mirrors, but by the end of the year I found myself with an acute knowledge of the reflected image, its numerous tricks and wiles, how it can spring up at any moment: a glass tabletop, a well-polished door handle, a darkened window, a pair of sunglasses, a restaurant’s otherwise magnificent brass-plated coffee machine sitting innocently by the cash register.

A son chronicles his father’s death:

My father's mortician was a careless barber. Stepping up to the open casket, I realized too much had been taken off the beard. The sides were trimmed tidy, the bottom cut flat across. It was a disconcerting sight, because in his last years, especially, my father had worn his beard wild, equal parts loony chemist and liquor store Santa. The mortician ought to have known this, I thought, because he knew the man in life. My father — himself the grandson of a funeral home director — would drop by Davey-Linklater in Kincardine, Ontario, now and then for a friendly chat. How's business? Steady as she goes? Death was his favourite joke.

Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me.

Remembering a relationship through IM.

On Lance Armstrong’s return to racing after cancer.

Why your phone may (or may not) be killing you.

Timothy Brown was diagnosed with HIV in the ’90s. In 2006, he found that a new, unrelated disease threatened his life: leukemia. After chemo failed, doctors resorted to a bone marrow transplant. That transplant erased any trace of HIV from his body, and may hold the secret of curing AIDS.

A profile of Jobs. The themes: immortality, relinquishing control, and how being adopted affected his choices for Apple. The lede: “One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.”

The life and death of Johnny Romano, the youngest pro skateboarder ever.