When I was twenty-five years old I appeared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in my underwear. Well, almost. A cartoon drawing of a girl in her underwear—a girl who, with her short blond hair and apple cheeks over a pointed chin, looked remarkably like me—appeared in conjunction with an essay I’d written about the way Generation X was reacting to the safe-sex message. The year was 1996 and the AIDS crisis, though technically past its apogee, seemed to have finally succeeded in infiltrating every corner of the general public consciousness and scaring the hell out of it. Invocations to

The jungle outpost of Lago Agrio is in northeastern Ecuador, where the elevation plummets from the serrated ridge of the Andes to the swampy lowlands of the Amazon Basin. Ecuadorans call the region the Oriente. For centuries, the rain forest was inhabited only by indigenous tribes. But, in 1967, American drillers working for Texaco discovered that two miles beneath the jungle floor lay abundant reserves of crude oil. For twenty-three years, a consortium of companies, led by Texaco, drilled wells throughout the Ecuadoran Amazon. Initially, the jungle was so impenetrable that the consortium had

Within hours of the death of Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, people began to show up at Apple stores with flowers, candles, and messages of bereavement and gratitude, turning the company’s retail establishments into shrines. It was an oddly fitting tribute to the man who started Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976 and built it up to become, as of last August, the world’s most valuable corporation, one with more cash in its vault than the US Treasury. Where better to lay a wreath than in front of places that were themselves built as shrines to Apple products, and whose glass staircases and

Books of essays don’t sell, an editor once told me, so don’t send me one. Joseph Epstein, who considers the label “essayist” an honorific and who himself has been one of the editors of the annual series, The Best American Essays, has compared the essayist’s place in the realm of literature to a seat at the children’s table at the family holiday dinner. Not to get too snooty about it, as Joe Epstein might say, the essay deserves a better seat than that, maybe even one at the high table.

"Gee I’m afraid I wont be good for anything after this war!”, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his parents in September 1918. He was recuperating at an Alpine hotel on Lake Maggiore, having been granted leave from the military hospital where he was undergoing “electrical treatments” on his severely wounded legs. “All I know now is war”, the nineteen-year-old continued. “Everything else seems like a dream.”

All aspects of the statement may be marked down as the heady utterance of a young man who was aware he had performed a courageous act, knew that his ordeal under fire was over, and was in the throes

Is there any other living novelist who calls for a perpetual re-evaluation as much as Stephen King? Thirty-seven years after the publication of his first novel, Carrie, King still seems not just underrated but uncomprehended. For years his critical evaluation was hampered by the dual whammy of his being not only a genre writer but an immensely successful one. He was ridiculed and dismissed when he was paid any attention at all, yet when he didn’t go the convenient route of fading away after a few bestsellers (all but two of his books have remained in print), a sort of grudging attention began