Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. When I was a child, the neighborhood drugstore where I snuck out to buy candy also trafficked in another forbidden treat: a tall, rotating rack stocked with mass-market paperbacks, the covers of which mostly...

Dealing with breast cancer during the pandemic has taught one family about the importance of getting the right kind of insurance — and giving your insurer the right information. Sara Regan, 44, “felt that life had been cut short” when she discovered she had breast cancer. “I’ve always wanted to travel, see America, and it was like it had been snatched away. You’re trying to think about your health, Covid-19, your finances, there’s so much.” Sara, a business centre manager in Oswaldtwistle,...

Just how much Lovecraft can be found in Lovecraft Country, the new HBO series based on the 2016 novel of the same title by Matt Ruff? Explicitly, not all that much, despite an opening fantasy sequence in which a monstrous, tentacled being who is very clearly Cthulhu, the most familiar (and—dare I say it?—beloved) of Lovecraft’s “elder gods,” is walloped to icky smithereens by Jackie Robinson, in a scene that surely would have driven Lovecraft himself mad with indignation. Yet “Lovecraft...

Middle-aged homeowners are encountering problems getting a mortgage deal because lenders have failed to keep up with the trend for borrowers getting on the property ladder later in life. Banks increasingly insist that borrowers continue working for the term of their loan, or deem them to be borrowing too much, too old. Eight in ten homeowners who are retired and over 55 have had trouble getting a mortgage, according to research by Responsible Life, a broker for older borrowers. Even those...

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. Helen Macdonald’s celebrated 2014 memoir, H Is for Hawk, describes her efforts to address her grief at the death of her beloved father by taming a goshawk. It’s not your usual tale of healing human-animal...