When??I think about??happiness, it is not an image I see, though I know the ads that show perfectly matched children hugging their toys or an impeccable couple strolling on the beach at an exclusive resort or a silver-haired pair holding hands beside a golf cart. My happiness moves. Where I live in the west of Ireland, often in the evening a bar of golden light blazes along the horizon of the ocean. Then small clouds, ragged and wistful, drift across ...

James Phung saw Phone Booth before you did. What's more, he saw it for free, in the comfort of his private home-screening room. Phung isn't a movie star or a Hollywood insider; he's a junior at the University of Texas who makes $8 an hour at the campus computer lab. But many big-budget Hollywood movies have their North American premieres in his humble off-campus apartment. Like millions of other people, Phung downloads movies for ...

The drug-related violence in Mexico is harrowing and depressing. It poses a growing danger to Mexican civil society, the Mexican economy and the U.S. We are Mexico's largest trading partner, and only part of that business is drugs. The simple equation has always been one of supply and demand: America's insatiable demand drives the drug business in Mexico. But the huge increase in violence and lawlessness in Mexico over the past five years vastly outstrips the rise in drug use ...

Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks ...

Convened in Washington, in November 2008, the first G-20 summit was a hasty attempt by top economies to forge common cause against a rapidly escalating financial crisis. That initial consensus risks unraveling at the G-20's fourth summit, in Toronto on June 26-27, with the U.S. and the European Union notably parting ways on how best to restore economic health. The summit follows an extraordinary austerity drive by European economies as they attempt to redress their public finances. In ...

Imagine you're having a heart attack. Your co-workers call 911, and the medics arrive. Under lights and sirens, traffic cleaves as the path clears to the hospital where doctors and nurses are waiting to administer lifesaving treatment. Now imagine that instead of going to the ER down the street, the medics are forced to take you to another hospital on the other side of town 20 minutes away. You are clutching your chest and dripping with sweat, ...

J.K. Rowling gave birth to Harry Potter, but Mary GrandPre breathed life into him for millions of readers. As illustrator of the Potter saga, GrandPre made evocative drawings that traced Harry's often-perilous journey through adolescence, and in the process shaped the world's image of the book's hero. GrandPre spoke with TIME about how she went about drawing Potter and what it was like to recast Harry's image for an upcoming 10th anniversary edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. TIME: How'd you wrangle ...

There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolao than Bolao himself, which is a shame because he's dead. At the time of his death, in 2003, Bolao was a major writer in the Spanish-speaking world but virtually unknown and untranslated in English. Why that should be is not much of a mystery. Bolao was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as ...

The attempt to catalog all the ways that Americans can go crazy dates at least to 1840, when the Census included a question on "idiocy/insanity." From those two simple categories, we now have more than 300 separate disorders; they are listed in a 943-page book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short. The book is important because doctors, insurers and researchers all over the world use it as a reference, a ...

One year ago on Tuesday, at least 57 men and women, including 31 journalists, were slaughtered on a grassy clearing in the southern Philippines. They were on their way to a political event, driving caravan-style through Maguindanao province's rugged, green hills when their convoy was stopped by armed men — allegedly members of a private army controlled by Andal Ampatuan Jr., the scion of the clan that rules the area. They were forced out of their vehicles, ...