Author: Joanna Hofer

It’s the end of the term and you’re up late. Everything is eerily quiet. You look out your window. The darkness is endless. You know he’s out there, the Sand Man. He’s stalking you. Tempting you. Asking you to relinquish your dreams for his.

For anyone who has ever been tongue-tied in a moment of humiliation, wronged but shamefully silent, despair not. You can still have your say.

Inspired after meeting people on the 2004 campaign trail, John and Teresa Heinz Kerry wrote This Moment on Earth in hopes of restoring a traditional sense of responsibility for environmental stewardship.

Evidence for water on Mars is mounting. Last week a broken wheel on NASA’s Spirit Rover upturned Martian soil with a 90 percent concentration of silica, which scientists believe required water to produce.

After Dark is the latest work of fiction from award-winning Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin, After Dark is a novella that offers glimpses into the lives of a handful of seemingly unrelated characters.

It is late afternoon and you are an American on the streets of Lahore, Pakistan. Perhaps you are lost. Maybe you are seeking the perfect cup of tea. Perhaps that is your excuse if anyone should ask. A Pakistani man approaches you.

Whenever I see pictures of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, I can’t help myself. I wish I had been there. I wish I could have seen it, up close, in person. It’s gruesome, I know.

E-mail is the fast, reckless, often feckless communication medium on which our world now depends.

May 11 marks the anniversary of one of the most famous U.F.O. sightings in U.S. history. In 1950 in McMinnville, Ore., farmer Paul Trent and his wife Evelyn were doing their evening chores when they saw “a large, metallic-looking, disc-shaped object hovering silently in the sky.”

What causes us to believe one person but not another? When someone has convinced us that great horrors exist, can our opinions be altered?

No one is naturally beautiful. That is, no one except for men. Men are naturally beautiful. They must be. With a haircut, a shave and some deodorant (if we’re lucky), they’re done. That’s all they have to do.