"In the weeks after my husband moved out, I received an email from someone offering to help me clean the house or cook, an email that evokes images of dishes piling up in the sink, flies hovering around half-eaten peanut-butter sandwiches, laundry accumulating. I wonder where these nightmarish visions of our domestic situation are coming from. Why would the departure of my husband launch me and my daughter into a life of squalor? Someone else writes: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved five minutes away but died."

A statistical analysis of literature yields some surprises.

Mark Story photographs faces that have been lived in.

Tim Adams was interviewing James Watson one day when he innocently remarked upon the "perfect simplicity" of Watson/Crick's revelation of the genetic code.

Just about any consumer-electronics product that needs to generate voltage gain can be made with a vacuum tube. It isn't hard to do. <I>It's no big deal.</I>

Just about any consumer-electronics product that needs to generate voltage gain can be made with a vacuum tube. It isn't hard to do. <I>It's no big deal.</I>