Readings

On marriage, the problems with sisterhood, and how the show Girls is an update of the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott. The fourth in a series of personal essays about reading.

Beginning in the 1960s, Don McCullin's images of war, urban strife, and poverty helped define and popularize the practice of photojournalism as we know it today. With a retrospective exhibition of McCullin's work currently at the National Gallery, we spoke with McCullin, who now questions the value of the very images he risked his life to capture.

Why do anything when you can just think about it? No, really. Writers like Geoff Dyer and Lars Iyer (author, most recently, of the novel Exodus) have turned this into a philosophy.

However much public awareness of bullying and its consequences has increased, we have a habit of oversimplifying cases that defy easy equations of cause and effect. As Emily Bazelon points out, it's rarely as straightforward a case of one kid being driven to despair solely by the bigger, meaner kids.