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Psychological aspects

Certain Age

by Ottessa Moshfegh, Kristine McKenna,

Dialogue

Never Never Man

From “Severe Growing-Up Phobia,” a paper that was coauthored by Laurencia Perales Blum and published in Case Reports in Psychiatry, in 2014. The paper discusses a Mexican boy who suffered…

The Bed-Rest Hoax

by Alexandra Kleeman,

The case against a venerable pregnancy treatment

The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit,

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…

Lives by Omission

by J. M. Coetzee,

By J. M. Coetzee, from The Good Story, out last month from Viking. The book collects a series of exchanges between Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, on the correspondences…

The Grand Shattering

by Sarah Manguso,

I never wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be a person. My identity crisis began at age three, when I wanted to be Popeye but realized that I…

Self-Portrait with Daughters

by A. Balkan,

It was summer and I was a new father, to eight-month-old daughters. I was the pilot of a car trip: New York City to somewhere near Lake Michigan — a…

Dressed to Kill

by John Crowley,

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me three hours with Chris Davis, a master falconer and breeder of hawks. My time would be spent meeting the hawks that…

Surviving a Failed Pregnancy

by Vanessa Gregory,

The medical ordeal no one wants to talk about

Ways of Being Silent

by Tillie Olsen,

from the archive 50 years ago in Harper’s Magazine Literary history and the present are dark with silences: the years-long silences of acknowledged greats; the ceasing to publish after one…

Some Notes on Song

by John Berger,

The rhythms of listening