Journalist Claire Hoffman grew up in a utopian community in Fairfield, Iowa. At first, she says, "it was entirely magical." Then doubt crept in.... A Childhood Of Transcendental Meditation, Spent In ...

Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King opens with a woman, Hirut, sitting on the floor of a train station in the Ethiopian city of Addis Ababa, holding an old metal box. She's traveled here, the reader is ...

Author Claire Hoffman estimates that she's spent at least 2,200 hours of her life meditating — but not because she became a devotee of the practice as an adult. Her mother was a follower of the ...