Lip Service

Smile, and the whole world smiles with you. But they don't all necessarily mean the same thing. Marianne LaFrance convinces us there's a secret wealth concealed behind that most common of facial expressions. Drawing from the allied fields of medicine, biology, psychology and anthropology, with a dash of computer science, LaFrance dissects the smile into its component parts and reassembles them into a potent force for both transparency and chicanery, friendship and enmity.

June 19: On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings inspired…

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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