Our starting point for all commemorations must be deep sorrow, not only for the lives lost, but the effects on those who remained. By Peter FitzSimons.

How America boosts the Afghan opium trade. By Andrew Cockburn.

“Even though, then, the Existentialists have experienced absurdity, the senselessness of human existence, they essentially end up affirming the perpetuity of the human subject, which is exactly what the experience of absurdity, being one of evanescence, denies.” By Timofei Gerber.

Chad Cowan

Chart Party

Alex Landragin on tinnitus as a burden and an existential clarion call.

Palliative-care doctors explain the “existential slap” that many people face at the end. By Jennie Dear.

Joseph Nanni

As a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has helped others grapple with their mortality. Now he is preparing for his own end. By Jordan Michael Smith.

Keith Lowe’s The Fear and the Freedom is an intimate portrayal of how human beings carry on when their world has changed for ever. By John Gray.

The US dropped 270 million bombs on Laos during the Vietnam war. More than 40 years later, the devices are still killing people. By Rosita Boland.

Glimpsed through the lens of Guite’s biography, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” constitutes the “involucrum” of Coleridge’s existential chrysalis. By Kelly Grovier.

Alzheimer's destroyed my mother's memory, but she remembered the doll. By Maria Browning.

For those suffering the trauma of intensive care, the soothing swoosh of otherworldly ambient music can be a welcome gift. By Charles Fernyhough.

“The ancient Greek Menander once said: ‘Woman is a pain that never goes away.’ He probably just meant women were trouble, but his words hold a more sinister suggestion: the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness.” By Leslie Jamison.

Maggie Smith

There are two kinds of suffering: the patient wrestling with more than he or she can endure. And the family watching, unable to help and also at the mercy of the medical staff. By Pete Dexter, Jeff Nale.

The scourge of autumn, annoyer of millions. Can anyone stop the seasonal siege of gas-powered landscaping equipment? By David Dudley.

Industrialization brought massive changes to warfare during the Great War. Newly-invented killing machines begat novel defense mechanisms, which, in turn spurred the development of even deadlier technologies. Nearly every aspect of what we would consider modern warfare debuted on World War I battlefields. By Alan Taylor.

An hour-by-hour look at the key local races, and how the night will play out for Clinton and Trump. By Peter Keating.