Bergman: There is a surgical aspect to restoration and to restorative art: suturing wounds, resetting bones. But it requires a wide variety of skills, including elements of sculpture and cosmetology.

They were both named Davis, but they were not married to each other and they were not related by blood. They were neighbors, however. They were both indecisive people, or rather, they could be very ...

Pen remembers it all. It was 1968. They took a family vacation to Sanibel. Pen’s father drove the station wagon. He held the wheel tightly and gritted his teeth and smoked cigarettes when he wasn’t ...

In William Maxwell’s novel The Château (1961), a young Francophile American couple spends four months in Europe amid the United States’ rapidly growing political, economic, and cultural hegemony.

From a New York Times report, published January 14, 2015, on the outcome of the Powerball lottery. The world’s biggest lottery jackpot of $1.5 billion will be a three-way split of $528 million each.

At first I dreaded having to investigate the history of sleep. Human slumber appeared impervious to time and place, stubbornly immune to the element of change animating most works of history. My own ...

Whereas child bed wetters in sixteenth-century England had been directed for their malady to consume the testicles of a hedgehog or the windpipe of a cock, Enlightenment science, which rejected ...

From an early age, I was very interested in nudity. My father was a nudist manqué. He made many attempts, to which I was witness, to cajole my mother into going with him to a genuine nudist colony in ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

After New York City experienced record rainfall this summer, my basement flooded. Water destroyed boxes of books and manuscripts, sitting several inches deep in a plastic crate full of photographs. I ...

Let’s start with a wicked little paragraph. Guy Debord chose to kill himself the old-fashioned way; Jean-Luc Godard—“the dumbest Swiss Maoist of them all,” in the words of the amusing ...