Bob Woodward, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, "The Yellow Birds" and more...

“Contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain. The telephone is an ever-present threat to privacy … and the invention of the car telephone has ensured that drivers who install it are never out of touch with those who want to talk to them.”

So wrote Anthony Storr in his book, “Solitude: A Return to the Self.” I bought it not long ago from a coastal thrift store for a quarter and read it practically in one sitting.

Solitude’s publication date? 1988...

Danny Sullivan dreams of gardening and spending time with his grandchildren, but that's just a fantasy. Retirement is out of his reach, at least for the foreseeable future.

The 62-year-old founder of a small catering company spends his days helping stock bars with beer and ice, wooing potential new clients and juggling the 20 to 30 different events his firm handles daily.

"I am so tired," he says. "I don't know that I'll ever be able to retire."...

The plight of elephants in Africa is being explained, in graphic and saddening detail, in a new series of stories by my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times. “An epic elephant slaughter,” he calls it, with poachers wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year for their ivory.

The killing has now reached a kind of frenzy, and even military units in central Africa are involved, gunning down elephants from their helicopters. Ivory tusks, most of them bound for China, have become the new blood diamonds.

The poachers have already done their worst in Vietnam. Along with developers, loggers, villagers and negligent bureaucrats, they have conspired to reduce the wild elephant population to just a few dozen...

Yesterday I was reading something from a fellow blogger about how he always buys solid-colored shirts at Target. His wife had posted a picture of him on Facebook, and it makes me laugh to tag pictures with ridiculous tags, so I tagged his pic. He was holding a piece of bacon, so I tagged it "Bacon" (duh). I tagged his eyes, "his eyes how they twinkled" and his cheek with "his dimples how merry," etc. I got to the shirt and tried to tag it "Target" and Facebook said I didn't have permission. Meh. But that made me remember I'd been at Target over the weekend with Lily...

It's time to leave the farm in Maryland.

My brother has sold the fields that surround us and the new owner has put “No Trespassing” signs at the end of the lane that goes past our barn to the old tenant house and then down to the stream.

“You and Rock can still walk down there if you ask permission,” the new owner told us.

It would be easier to move than to ask permission to walk over fields that I know like the curve of my own hips. I know where the stream turns, where the otter lives...

A combination of miscalculations, ideological rigidity and discord within the leadership of both political parties brought the U.S. government to the brink of a catastrophic default during the 2011 showdown over the federal debt ceiling, according to a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

“The Price of Politics,” Woodward’s 17th book, chronicles President Obama’s contentious and still unresolved fiscal policy battle with congressional Republicans that dominated the White House agenda for nearly all of 2011. (On Sunday, The Washington Post will publish an adaptation in its print, mobile and Web editions. The book is scheduled for release on Tuesday. Woodward is a Post associate editor.)

As the nation’s leaders raced to avert a default that could have shattered the financial markets’ confidence and imperiled the world’s economy, Obama convened an urgent meeting with top congressional leaders in the White House. According to Woodward, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) pointedly told the president that the lawmakers were working on a plan and wouldn’t negotiate with him...

One day before Mark Bissonnette's controversial tell-all on the bin Laden raid is released, his colleagues have published their own e-book response to what they call the "greatest betrayal"...

Among the many mysteries of human biology is why complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat. An equally perplexing puzzle is why one individual gets a disease like cancer or depression, while an identical twin remains perfectly healthy.

Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave...