What The Americans Gets Right About Spying and Intimacy

At the End of Its Third Season, the Best Show on TV Keeps Its Friends Close and Its Enemies Very Close

With the close of its third season, The Americans, Joe Weisberg’s twisty spy drama, remains the best show on television. It’s not excellent because it’s often thrilling—though it is—but because it understands that espionage is about the cultivation of intimacy rather than the mere collection of intelligence. At its core, it tells a story about human relationships, about the bonds we form, the way that we form them, and how we change in the process.

Along with his collaborators, Weisberg, who once served as a CIA officer, staged The Americans’ latest …

Don’t Freak Out if You’re Not Lusting After a Baby

You Don’t Have to Be Selfish, Shallow, or Self-Absorbed to Decide Not to Become a Parent

Why do some adult men and women choose not to have kids? Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum had only seen the topic addressed in a “really glib, flippant way.” …

Why Do Birds Fall in Love?

Bickering Hummingbirds and Devoted Albatrosses Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Courtship and Commitment

On Valentine’s Day, our thoughts inevitably turn to the birds and the bees. And as someone who studies birds, I can tell you our feathered friends have much to teach …

Hearts All Atwitter, if Only on Twitter

These Days, Virtual Relationships Like Manti Te’o’s Are Not All That Crazy

“What I went through was real. You know, the feelings, the pain, the sorrow—that was all real, and that’s something that I can’t fake.” So said Notre Dame football player …

When My Dad Came Out

I Dealt With It Badly. So Did He.

“Are you gay?” my 12-year-old self asked, as if asking about the weather.

We had stopped in the deli section of a supermarket near my father’s home in metro Detroit to …

It Takes a Village–Or a Friend’s Parents

They’re Not Mom and Dad. In Some Ways, They’re Better.

My oldest friend emailed this past week with a blow to the heart: Joann McArthur had died, of cancer, on her 70th birthday.

It is hard to describe why this news …