When “The Beach” hit American cinemas just over 10 years ago, most of the hype surrounding the movie centered on its star, Leonard DiCaprio, and its director, Danny Boyle. Scant media attention was given to the movie’s core themes, which drew on Alex Garland’s 1996 novel of the same name about a community of Western backpackers veering its way into self-destruction on an anonymous Thai island.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

How did play get to be so much work? We New York mothers ask ourselves this question every fall, for while school gets our children out from underfoot, their menu of weekend and after-school activities turns us into full-time social secretaries. We could, of course, put the children in regular after-school programs, and many do. But if we don’t.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I’d played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barreling down the street to greet me. This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Fans of sports underdogs have had an amazing run these past few months. In February, the New Orleans Saints won their first-ever Super Bowl, an upset victory over the invincible Colts.. At the beginning of April, a little-known college from the Midwest made it to the NCAA basketball title game against the hated Blue Devils.  And more recently, the Oklahoma City Thunder very nearly forced the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers to a seventh game in the first round of the NBA playoffs.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

For most of Winter 2007, I was in Canada’s Northwest Territory, in a series of small towns about two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. After twelve years of freelance writing, I have either traveled for work or traveled while between jobs, and I’ve been a few places around the world — Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, most of Europe. But the Arctic is nothing like the world that I’ve seen. It’s more like pictures of the moon.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that “spatial mobility” would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie.  Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940.  That’s good news for families, communities and even the environment.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972.  Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>