Lauren Daley

2 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Lauren Daley

Many of us have a record we turn to in tough times, and ever since Warren Zanes was a student at Massachusetts’ Phillips Andover, his go-to has been Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic solo record, “Nebraska.”“In any hard passage in my life, ‘Nebraska’ went back on the turntable,” Zanes, 59, said in our recent phone interview from his Montclair, N.J., home.

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Lauren Daley

If you need a reality-escape, there’s nothing better than a mystery or thriller. Whether it’s a caper to solve, or a psychological twister with fascinating characters that keep you guessing, this genre can sweep you away like nothing else. Here are 13 of my recent favorites. Blending outdoor adventure, wilderness survival, a missing person, and poetic prose, Maine-set “Heartwood,” by New Englander Amity Gaige is my pick for the best thriller of 2025 so far.

3 weeks ago | boston.com | Lauren Daley |Zipporah Osei

Growing up in a small coal-mining town in Appalachia, travel “wasn’t a thing,” Jennifer Haigh tells me in a recent phone interview from her Boston home. “But I’ve wanted to go to China my whole life. Then this chance just fell out of the sky.”That chance was a fellowship from the Shanghai Writers Association in 2016. Haigh applied and got it. There, her wheels began turning when she witnessed the megacity’s traffic. “Shanghai makes New York look like a cowtown. In 2016, it was one big traffic jam.

3 weeks ago | boston.com | Lauren Daley

They’re aptly called “Frankenhouses.” And Massachusetts couple Mike and Denese Butler are back to fix more of ‘em in season 2 of HGTV’s “Fix My Frankenhouse.”Prime example: in one upcoming episode, “we had to hide a poop-shoot,” Mike Butler, 40, says with a laugh in our recent phone interview. “We had to hide the sanitary pipe for an upstairs bathroom that went right through the kitchen, which is not ideal at all.”Season 2 premieres April 2 at 9 p.m on HGTV.

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Lauren Daley

Ever since a teenage Joseph Henry Burnett III woke in a cold sweat in his Fort Worth, Texas bedroom from a dystopian fever-dream, he’s rallied for humanity. “I had a recurring nightmare that we were all lined up around the parish hall of my Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and shadow-men were removing everybody’s right hand and replacing it with an electronic hand that would become their control mechanism,” Burnett, 77, tells me in a recent phone interview from his Nashville home.