Students often speak of wanting to “be a writer,” glossing over the vast amount of doing required to occupy that particular state of being. The contributors to this volume agree that writers don’t necessarily choose to be writers;... Read More

Smokers who have managed to wean themselves from cigarettes tend to behave a little like born-again Christians, eagerly proselytizing to help others get back on the path to salvation. Some of the self-help books written by these... Read More

The nearest moral substitute for righting a wrong is exposing it-blowing the whistle. Much of the exposed wrongdoing that makes the evening news nowadays is of a magnitude beyond the ability of most individuals to rectify, and... Read More

A diagnosis of prostate cancer occurs within a haze of medical uncertainty that is probably unparalleled in addressing other types of cancer. While the disease remains localized, physicians (or their patients) may choose one of three... Read More

If quitting cigarettes were as easy as starting, most smokers, having learned about the health risks, would simply stop smoking. But there’s nothing simple about quitting, as the author readily acknowledges. She doesn’t claim to have... Read More

It was May, 1985, and the author, a professor at the University of Rochester, was grading papers “with the usual sense of futility” (as he recalled in a letter to his father) when he noticed that the sentence through which he was... Read More