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 ...

There are some very important things they don't tell you on career day. Chief among them is that there is a good chance that at some point during your working adult life you will have an abusive boss — the kind who uses his or her authority to torment subordinates. Bullying bosses scream, often with the goal of humiliating. They write up false evaluations to put good workers' jobs at risk. Some are serial bullies, targeting one ...

High infant mortality, low life expectancy, soaring health-care costs — the symptoms are numerous and the diagnosis unmistakable: America's health-care system is ailing. But like a patient who coughs or limps his way through an illness, the U.S. has often been reluctant to look for help. That's changing. The Obama Administration promises to offer universal coverage, introduce electronic records and wrestle health-care costs under control — in short, at least part of the health-care revolution that many Americans have advocated for ...

THERE is an old saying that philosophy bakes no bread. It is perhaps equally true that no bread would ever have been baked without philosophy. For the act of baking implies a decision on the philosophical issue of whether life is worthwhile at all. Bakers may not have often asked themselves the question in so many words. But philosophy traditionally has been nothing less than the attempt to ask and answer, in a formal and disciplined way, the great questions ...

If you're craving a quick hit of optimism, reading a newsmagazine is probably not the best way to go about finding it. As the life coaches and motivational speakers have been trying to tell us for more than a decade now, a healthy, positive mental outlook requires strict abstinence from current events in all forms. Instead, you should patronize sites like HappyNews.com, where the top international stories of the week include "Jobless Man Finds Buried Treasure" and ...

TIME Correspondent Don Sider spent several days at Khe Sanh last week ducking incoming shells and observing the unique quality of life in the besieged Marine base. His report: A chill, grey mist hangs over the jungled hills around Khe Sanh and drifts down onto the base's metal run way. The morning mist often lasts into the afternoon, the bright sun of recent weeks is lost in monsoonal overcast, and the air is raw and wet with winter. The camp ...

One of the unusual features of British public life today is the amount of anti-German feeling now being stirred up. Part of it is political: Nye Bevan and his left-wing Socialists are setting up a hue and cry about "Guns for the Huns"—not bothering, of course, to point out that the Communists have already armed East Germany. In Lord Beaverbrook, the maverick Tory press lord, the Socialists have an unexpected ally. His big Daily Express is so het up ...

The good news: it is important for the young to stay lean, but a little heft helps people live longer, according to a federal researcher at the Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore. The bad news: many obesity and cardiovascular specialists say that lifelong leanness is still the desirable goal. Guidelines on girth have been the subject of a growing dispute since 1983, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. updated its charts on desirable weight. The poundage associated with the lowest ...

TIME: A Secretary of State and a superstar are kind of an unlikely couple. What brought you two together? HC: [Laughing.] Well, I started out as a great fan of [Julia's] before I ever knew her. I have gotten to know her over the years and now am an even greater fan. And she did this fabulous special, Extraordinary Moms, which I guess is going to be on television around Mother's Day, right? JR: Yes, May 7. HC: So we ...

YOUTH One sociologist calls them "the Freudian proletariat." Another observer sees them as "expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society." Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as "a red warning light for the American way of life." For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: "There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest—something good." To their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more ...