(Top) Fabienne (right) in striped shirt on a summer boat ride in Switzerland, eating either a jambon-beurre or Cenovis sandwich. (Above) Fabienne’s christening with her parents, Dennis and Véronique.

As our nation’s semiquincentennial looms ominously, I’ve been thinking less about Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” and more about his 1972 track “Big Brother,” a world-weary song inspired by George ...

A few months ahead of the 2020 presidential election, singer-songwriter Gillian Welch took to Instagram and shared a black-and-white Depression-era photo taken by Dorothea Lange when she was ...

In 2025, we were told time and time again that AI is the future — that it will democratize music. People who can’t carry a tune or play an instrument can simply type what they want, such as “deep ...

Granny won me over with the government cheese. As a child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, when I’d visit her on occasional Sundays in Blue Ridge, Georgia, she’d slice me off a little treat — an orange ...

In the 1950s, my paternal grandmother began to lose her hearing. She was late in midlife by then, and by the time she reached her 70s it was almost gone, reduced to shrill, high-pitched whistles and ...

In the blanketing heat of late July I found myself in a packed courtroom in East Tennessee, watching history repeat itself. The tiny town of Dayton has hosted a reenactment of the Scopes trial every ...

Eight months after doctors cut the cancer out of my mom, four months after her second surgery, three months after she closed the women’s consignment boutique she owned for 10 years, two months before ...

In the spring of 2023, Hannah Mann Rees decided that there were books in the library that she didn’t like. Rees lives in Prattville, Alabama, a city of almost 40,000 on the outskirts of Montgomery.

The week police found her dead in the woods, the woods were coming alive. It was late February, that tender time when the canopy has yet to leaf but ephemeral flowers speckle the forest floor. Under ...

It is 3 o’clock in the morning, I am lying in bed reading on my phone, and this word pops up in my feed: petrichor. Chronic insomnia since I was a child. A cyclonic brain that will not rest, that is ...

The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show ...