If you're anxious about life today, TV this fall is inviting you to journey to a happier time. A time when ketchup was a vegetable, when Saddam Hussein was a strategic ally, when children went to school, teenagers courted and families thrived with no greater worries than the possibility that they might at any moment be incinerated in a global nuclear war. If programmers are correct, the state of the American psyche is such that suicide attacks and anthrax ...

Death abides with all fanatics, not least because they are so often willing to risk it for their cause. It presses close around Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who has made death his specialty, closer still last week as he returned to the practice that so often had seemed destined to land him in jail. "To go to jail is the ultimate slavery," he told TIME. "If I have lost my freedom, I have lost something more valuable than life. Therefore, ...

On a Sunday at their modest, gray ranch house in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Tim and Jeanine Pynes gather with four other Christians for an evening of fellowship, food and faith. Jeanine's spicy rigatoni precedes a yogurt-and-wafer confection by Ann Moore, none of the food violating the group's solemn commitment to Weight Watchers. The participants, who have pooled resources for baby sitting, discuss a planned missionary trip and sing along with a CD by the Christian crossover group Sixpence ...

On Nov. 27, 2005, a man in Faribault, Minn., received an e-mail with a subject line that read, "Melissa goodbye to Li Dao." It was a suicide note, scribbled digitally, sent by a woman to her online pen pal who had actively encouraged her to embrace death. The only catch: Li Dao was not a real person, and, according to authorities, the virtual advice was not an act of empathy but an attempt to manipulate Melissa into ...

A Maryland murder trial is being turned into a debate on the lingering traumatic impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the psyche of the Americans who served there. The prosecution is trying to prove that Gary Smith, a one-time Army Ranger, murdered his roommate of 20 days and fellow Ranger Michael McQueen, 22, by putting a .38-caliber revolver to his right temple and pulling the trigger. Smith's attorney, however, notes that the ...

Since the Jan. 14 death of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old in South Hadley, Mass., who committed suicide after being bullied by fellow students, many onlookers have meditated on whether the circumstances that led to her after-school hanging might have been avoided. Could teachers have stepped in and stopped the bullying? Could parents have done more to curtail bad behavior? Or could preventive measures have been started years ago, in early childhood, long before bullies emerged and started ...

As police investigate the motive behind the latest suicide bombing in Indonesia, the country is once again facing the specter of another wave of attacks by extremists. While recent bombings have targeted individuals rather than large groups, the trend has some analysts worried that the current threat could be harder to stamp out. "This is part of a pattern of do-it-yourself jihad," explains Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert at the International Crisis Group. "It falls under the ...

The last weeks of Kurt Cobain's life were filled with turmoil and anguish -- and gossip. Rumors floated through the music industry that the singer- songwriter's band, Nirvana, was breaking up; that Cobain, who had survived a tranquilizer-induced coma just six weeks earlier, had suffered another overdose. The stories seemed to be justified when the group unexpectedly backed out of headlining the Lollapalooza tour this summer. The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome an ...

Mention the term "euthanasia," and the first thing most people think of is the epic assisted suicide battle of the 1990s starring Jack "Doctor Death" Kevorkian. But the issue of whether human beings — and more pointedly, doctors — have the right to help others die has been in the public discourse since before the birth of Christ. The Hippocratic Oath, which scholars estimate was written in the fourth century B.C., includes the unambiguous statement: I will ...

Health-care woes are terminally funny in 'So Much for That' Just when you're sick to death of hearing/talking/thinking about health care reform, along comes a delicious novel about ... why we need health care reform. So Much for That, Lionel Shriver's improbably feel-good black comedy, is the rare book that can make suicide, near-bankruptcy and terminal cancer so engaging you can't wait to turn the page. It's no secret that Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Post-Birthday World) is brainy. But ...