10 Great Articles and Essays by Leslie Jamison

Articles/Essays

The Empathy Exams

A medical actor writes her own script

Fog Count

What happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion?

The Devil’s Bait

Symptoms, signs, and the riddle of Morgellons

Rehearsals

Weddings are holiness and booze, sweat under the dress, sweet icing in the mouth

The Breakup Museum

Archiving the way we were

In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale

On becoming a stepmother

The Immortal Horizon

Thirty-five runners face hollers and hells, a flooded prison, rats the size of possums, and flesh-flaying briars to test the limits of self-sufficiency

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars

The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life.