It’s easy to divorce the online purchases that arrive so swiftly and conveniently on your doorstep from the individual labor that got them there: The packaging is so uniform, the buying process so entirely impersonal, that it’s tempting to believe they were somehow selected and delivered by robotic magic. But in many cases, someone hand-picked […]

Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel “The Summer Book” wasn’t a memoir, but it was a memory piece of sorts — its slender narrative of largely unspoken grief and healing imbued with, and enriched by, the author’s palpable feeling for its remote Gulf of Finland island setting, where she herself maintained a rustic holiday house. That it’s […]

“Joy” has been a much-used title in recent years, one that a new film about the battle to develop in-vitro fertilization treatment justifies recycling once more with a late-film reveal: It was the middle name given to Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first so-called “test-tube baby,” and the first successful outcome in over a decade […]