How to portray the state referred to as mental illness? Who tells the story and with what language? Narratives tend to be categorical and unspecific. Dr. Jung famously told his patient James Joyce that the difference between him and his daughter Lucia—a dancer who was permanently institutionalized in her late twenties because of a “deteriorating mental state,” later diagnosed as schizophrenia—was one of control. “You are like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling the other diving,” Jung claimed. But what does that mean? Who was Lucia; what was her story?

In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a doctor in Ashfield, Massachusetts, published a short book with a long title: Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician. Knowlton, who was thirty-one, was a “freethinker” and, by the standards of the Berkshires, an unusually adventurous soul. While attending the New Hampshire Medical Institute (now Dartmouth Medical School), he was too poor to pay for a dissecting class and so had liberated a corpse from a cemetery.

The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, spent the two decades after its 1955 publication as an often out-of-print cult novel, read and discussed by a cadre of devotees who, as William Gass writes in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin Classics edition, “would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic.” For Gaddis fanatics, this history has become a kind of fable: how the great author, driven underground by critical ignorance and the neglect of his publisher, worked various corporate jobs until, in 1975, he would return to lampoon Wall Street in his

Twitter’s recent announcement that the social network will allow country-specific censorship aroused fury on and off the Internet. Under the new policy, Twitter will place a gray bar over tweets deemed inappropriate for popular consumption by local governmental authorities. Commentators, protesters, and “Tweetavists” expressed their outrage. Blackout protests were proposed in response, and activists warned of the potential of unreported massacres in Syria. Since then, however, the company has made clear that it will only censor tweets when it receives specific and valid requests to do so. But worry remains, and rightfully so: Will the once staid social networking giant,

If The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention? Or would this novel (which I loved) have been relegated to “Women’s Fiction,” that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated? Certainly The Marriage Plot, Eugenides’s first novel since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, was poised to receive tremendous literary interest regardless of subject matter, but the presence of a female protagonist, the gracefulness, the sometimes

In a scene near the end of Page One, Andrew Rossi’s 2011 documentary about the New York Times, Brian Stelter, a reporter on the Times media desk, learns that NBC is preparing to declare the end of the Iraq war. The network’s correspondent Richard Engel is embedded with what NBC describes as the “last combat troops” in Iraq, the US Army’s 4/2 Stryker Brigade. Engel’s live broadcast from the back of a troop transport vehicle rattling across the Kuwaiti border, anchor Brian Williams informs his audience on that evening’s NBC Nightly News, “constitutes the official Pentagon announcement” of the end

Nobody ever hated the contemporary world with as much intensity and conviction as J. G. Ballard. In five decades of unforgiving literary production, he drowned it, scorched it, flayed it with whirlwinds, deluged it with Martian sand, even transformed it into a crystalline jungle populated by jewel-skinned crocodiles, people and parrots. His characters have been sodomized in car crashes, driven crazy by scientific researchers, hounded by billboards and forced to observe atrocities looping endlessly on movie screens until even Zapruder’s exploding bullets seemed as mundane and predictable as elevator music. For Ballard, who died in 2009 at the age of

The conservative canonization of Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of the tax cut has always been a vexed rite. For one thing, Reagan actually raised taxes in 1982, when the country was sunk in a grim recession and the president’s economic advisers were sounding alarms over the gaping hole created in the federal budget by his 1981 package of tax cuts.