ArcaMax

CHICAGO — As students settle into the school year and “new normal,” parents take the journey with them — lending support and guidance as the back-to-school season unfolds amid the surprises and challenges everyday school interactions bring. Sometimes navigating the school year feels like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, where one ...Read more

For Matthew Linehan, escaping addiction was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of learning how to live.

In "Free Indeed: The 7 Keys to Unlock Your Freedom," he recounts his journey from three decades of alcohol and drug addiction to a life rooted in Christian faith. The transformation was hardly instantaneous. Nor did he make that ...Read more

A Las Vegas comic billed as “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” Lonny Day has built his career around impressions, especially a dead-on imitation of the president. Then the President is assassinated, Lonny’s signature act becomes unthinkable and almost everything else in his life starts coming apart.

His wife, Doris, is devastated and reaches...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- Once they were like you: obsessively checking apps after their children’s tryouts, dutifully schlepping kids and gear bags to practices and games, or wildly shouting from the bleachers.

Then the kids grew up, and they gained perspective. Some accumulated regrets.

We asked parents whose children have aged out of youth sports ...Read more

'VERITY'

Rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images.

What it’s about: A struggling writer enters a complex psychosexual relationship with a married couple when she's hired to finish a book series by a popular novelist.

The kid attractor factor: This is more of an adult melodrama, not for kids.

Good ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- Here’s how you create an elite athlete: Wake up at 5 a.m. Run wind sprints uphill. Endure your coach’s yelling. Tally 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Train in the offseason. And if you can’t cut it, you’re out.

That was part of the culture of American youth soccer when Ted Kroeten rose up as a coach decades ago. He ...Read more

Q. My son’s mother and I broke up seven months ago. She’s already living with someone else. He’s a felon and I’m furious that she’s dating someone like this. If he wasn’t in the picture, I’m sure we would have gotten back together. We have a 5-year-old son and I let him know every day that his mother has chosen this guy instead of ...Read more

After our son grew up and began carving out a life of his own, he left home as young men often do. It was about 21 years, one month, 17 days, three hours and 10 minutes ago, but who’s counting?

He married a young woman whose passion for camping, hiking, dogs, night skies and the great outdoors matched his. After tying the knot, they fled to ...Read more

It’s true. Millennials and Gen Xers love nostalgia. There’s a reason so many of us keep mining that time period of our childhood in the 1980s and ‘90s for fiction. Nostalgia isn’t just about reliving our carefree past when our knees were stronger, our skin was firmer, and our hair less gray. The late ‘90s occupies a really interesting ...Read more

Essay collections written by authors who focus on topics we may not often consider open us to new worlds of information and thought-provoking ideas.

These collections take readers on journeys of the mind and heart while exploring themes that offer ways to expand our views of the world. Written in bite-sized pieces, they are perfect for reading...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- This summer a schism fractured the baseball community in tight-knit St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where the modern forces of youth sports were about to dismantle a suburban relic.

For years, kids as old as 12 could still play Little League at a local park for a couple hundred bucks, placed on teams with kids of varying abilities. No...Read more

'HEART OF THE BEAST'

Rated PG-13 for violence, peril, bloody/injury images and some language.

What it’s about: A Special Forces Army veteran and his combat dog fight to endure the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash.

The kid attractor factor: This is more of an adult drama with dangerous and emotional situations, but kids might be ...Read more

Q: My ex wants us to celebrate our daughter's birthday together every year because she says it's better for our daughter. We don't fight in front of her, but being together is uncomfortable and I'm sure she can feel it. I'd rather have separate celebrations. Does putting the kids first mean we have to celebrate together? What’s good ex-...Read more

When a technician pronounced our refrigerator’s ice maker beyond repair two years ago, he bowed his head, marked the event with a moment of silence, then handed us an outrageous repair bill.

Not going down to defeat, or life without ice, we went out and bought two plastic ice cube trays. Making our own ice was such a throwback to the past ...Read more

We are certainly living in dark times these days… Who’s to say we aren’t loving in them, as well?

Back at the tail end of 2024, I was offered a wild opportunity to pitch a horror romance to an imprint at Harlequin Books. I leapt at the opportunity because, baked into this prospective shot, there was a gleeful demon on my shoulder, ...Read more