Every so often, I like to write about the newspaper articles that have caught my eye over the weekend. It feels like ages since I last sat down to write such a post and it turns out, it has been. When I looked back in the archives The Weekend Papers: Fourth Edition was posted on July 7th. It seems that perhaps the busy-ness of summer followed by the craziness of back to school cramped my newspaper reading just a bit! I have certainly read the paper since July but apparently not in a way that seemed meaningful enough to document. So here goes…

Forty Portraits in Forty Years written by Susan Minot features Nicholas Nixon’s ‘Forty Years with the Brown Sisters.’ Over the past 40 years, Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters in the same group pose, once each year. This life long project will be featured this fall at The Museum of Modern Art and the sampling of pictures on the pages of the magazine make me anxious to see the full exhibit.

The New York Time’s Modern Love essay is often one of my favorite parts of the weekend papers. This week’s At the Hospital, an Interlude of Clarity by Brian Gittis was no exception. Read on to see what happens when you fall on a glass and rupture an artery on your fourth date.

I wrote here recently that Lily King’s Euphoria is one of my favorite recent reads. I was excited, therefore, to read her piece Would Marriage Ruin Everything in this week’s NYT review section. Having read Euphoria, her personal experience with marriage was all the more interesting.

Crossing Class Lines by Stephanie Cote summarizes research conducted on how people befriend (or don’t) people from different social classes. According to this research, even those few people who befriend those in different social classes due so with difficulty. These friendships, researchers say, are fraught with tension and misunderstanding. What a sad statement this is to me. I wonder what can be done to change this as I believe that economic inequality is the greatest social injustice in the United States today. How do we fix this if we can’t even befriend those in differing class groups?

The way we could choose to spend our final days is beautifully explored in Atul Gawande’s The Best Possible Day. This surgeon, in his research, has come to believe that medical science may have it wrong. He writes of his daughter’s piano teacher and the way she stopped fighting and finished her life living, teaching piano and loving the music that had made her life.