The United States has only four percent of the planet’s population but a full one-quarter of its economic output, which is wealth for all intents and purposes. Pundits and laymen have offered various explanations, both scholarly and emotional, divine intervention frequently mentioned among them.

Look it, have you ever woken in the dead of night? It’s so dark that for a second, just a split second, you think you’ve died. And you’re so scared. And you lie there, and you feel so horrible and so… alone, and all that crap, you know? Yeah, well, with every step I took,…

I chose to come back to myself on Thursdays because who the hell would choose to live their life only in the first half of the week? All that expectation, Monday morning dread, realising you’ve got a whole week ahead of you of zero lie-ins and a to-do list as long as your arm. I…

Somewhere in a quiet, forgotten corner of Edmonton, somebody or something rapped on the door of Mr Thomas, the sort of man in his mid-70s who had retired long ago but had never really ceased working. It was a knock with no voice: a flurry of light raps might betray a nervous insistence, while heavy…

We wanted to be gypsies, the raggle-taggle vagabonds of folksongs and fairy tales. We wanted to meander through the countryside in brightly painted wooden caravans on wheels, pulled by thickset ponies with shaggy coats and fringed feet, to sleep under the stars and cook food on an open fire, lit by lanterns glimmering in the…

Yesterday, I think it was, I had a setback. I don’t have a sequence of events, before or after, but I sort of woke up midafternoon at the wheel of my car in a city forty miles west of our house. I didn’t remember driving there and as far as I know, I had no…

It’s been four hours and you’re still sitting in the green bucket chairs, not reading the array of People magazines on the table, as the wall clock barely ticks forward and Ryan sits next to you playing Fruit Ninja on his phone, using his left hand because the right one got hit with a line…