Michael Hastings, most recently of Buzzfeed but well-known and respected for his fearless reporting in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and elsewhere, has died at the age of 33
The store that sold Nancy Lanza the gun that her son used to kill her ended up losing its license to sell firearms six days after the shooting, new documents reveal. Not because of the massacre conducted by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary — because of violations stretching back way before Nancy Lanza ever entered the shop.
The World Meteorological Organization announced the retirement after deciding that the name was, well, "inappropriate."
Kirsten Powers on media coverage of an abortion trial, Fareed Zakaria on the lessons of Thatcherism, Drew Magary on Mike Rice's abuses, Charles M. Blow on Rand Paul's Howard visit, and Tom Doran on Michelle Malkin's Twitter aggregator.
When you ask someone if they have a "cab story," chances are, if you're in an urban, taxi-taking environment, the answer will be yes, and will be followed by any number of harrowing tales. But those are not the only stories.
After mastering the art of drones (by way of Photoshop) and the science of sending a monkey (that was not real) into space, the latest breakthrough out of Iran is a "time machine." The only thing stopping production, apparently, is the fear that China will make millions of crappy versions of it.
Police are investigating a severed goat head that was delivered to Tom Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, at the iconic Wrigley Field. That's weird right? Not in Chicago. Apparently this has happened before — several times.
Georgia officials won't say why a gunman took four of local firefighters hostage in a Freddie Mac-owned house on Wednesday afternoon, but based on that Freddie Mac detail, you can venture a guess.
Opponents criticize Wednesday's background check compromise, suggesting it wouldn't have prevented several high profile mass shootings. Indeed, of the 30 incidents since 2003 that we looked at, the new deal would quite possibly only have stopped one.
The NFL said that "half the league" would never get away with playing under the influence of the little blue pills, no matter what Seattle Seahawks All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman says.
The 24-hour New Jersey landmark is mostly known for serving comfort food beneath a giant sign imploring customers to "EAT HEAVY." But not today.
If you thought Virginia was weird, it's easier to pass a law through Montana's state legislature that allows citizens to eat their own roadkill than it is to strike down a law that made gay sex a felony punishable with up to 10 years in jail and a $50,000 fine.
New CNN president Jeff Zucker, as The Washington Post's Paul Farhi explains in a lengthy profile today, is a "hyper-competitive" but patient man who will try anything and everything to "blow up the place" and get you to watch the still struggling network without alienating the base — of viewers or advertisers.
Kelefa Sanneh on Brad Paisley's accidental racism, John McWhorter on the use of "illegal immigrant," Alex Pareene on Mitch McConnell's cunning, Farhad Manjoo on the Bitcoin hype cycle, and Thomas Friedman on the legacy of the Arab Spring.
What is the gift you can give to someone who has everything, including insomnia? The gift of sleep, of course. But it won't be cheap.
A treasury department letter shows the U.S. government fully, officially approved Beyoncé and Jay-Z's "educational exchange" trip to Cuba, but some politicians still aren't satisfied that they played by the government rules.
The New York Times national security correspondent and author of The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, is a fan of Homeland — despite covering the C.I.A., and despite the liberties the show takes.
Robin Kelly, the gun hating former Illinois state rep who's friends with Obama and enjoyed over $2 million of Bloomberg's money for her campaign, has won the election to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. It wasn't even close.
Fans of justice will be glad to hear that New York City will pay for all those books and all that media equipment that the police trashed when it famously raided the Occupy Wall Street camp on November 15, 2011
Powerball, the ubiquitous lottery game, finally arrived in California on Monday, and began to spread its enticing message of easy, instant fortune to residents of the Golden State.
Since the stabbing that wounded 14 people at a Houston-area college, one student has been taking some of the credit for apprehending his fellow student.
Equal Pay Day acknowledges one of the worst deals in the American economy. For every dollar an average man earns, his female counterpart earns 77 cents. Here's what that looks like by state — and in real time.
There is a change in the venerable Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will take place May 28 to 30 near Washington, D.C. Spelling is not enough. There's a vocabulary portion of the competition, now, too.
This is not how you'd expect Snapchat, the self-destructing image-sharing app, to get college kids into trouble: many underage students at the University of Virginia dumped their beer and spirits because of a social media hoax on Monday afternoon.
As Washington runs to-and-fro on firearm legislation, student gun enthusiasts at some universities are taking matters into their own hands by showing their desire for concealed weapons on campus. Here's how the gun lobby inside actual schools is trying — and failing — to set an example, one empty holster at a time.
Glenn Greenwald on the mourning of Margaret Thatcher, Bret Stephens on the other kind of marriage, Judith Miller on Jana Winter's jail prospects, David Plotz on his abusive high school basketball coach, and Jeffrey Goldberg on the legacy of the Iraq War.
The total reported impact of this still very mysterious strain has grown to eight deaths and 24 infected people, but the bird flu might just be a lot worse than China is letting on — and it wouldn't be the first time the country's health officials have "covered up" a major disease threat.
After a day full of criticism in the media, both of the situation and the coverage, Colorado district court Judge Carlos Samour Jr. decided to delay making a decision that would force Fox News reporter Jana Winter to reveal her anonymous sources or face jail time.
The grand jury process has begun, and potential new civil suits against the adults who own the homes may shed light on what's next. But local law experts and an examination of testimony reveal that, well, the grown-ups in Steubenville might get off the hook — and the jagged puzzle of accountability may go unsolved.
As summer approaches, you're probably beginning to wonder: do I really have to slather on sunscreen in order to protect myself from skin cancer? Well, if you trust empirical research — or listen to the Center for Disease Control — the answer is yes.
"I like small penises," said no women interviewed for an actually scientific study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Yes, PNAS is a funny sounding acronym, and, yes, PNAS has found that size does matter — and that women prefer "showers" to "growers."
A poll released over the weekend indicated that Americans don't want new gun laws — they want better enforcement of laws that are on the books. It also suggested that they don't actually know what laws exist. Which made us wonder: How would we do?
By the NRA's logic, one "detail" in the 225-page "report" that the gun lobby's National School Shield task force has now corrected should make the whole report just about useless. Yes, there are enough school shootings that last week's NRA-funded research findings managed to find a school shooting that never happened.
There is no question that BuzzFeed and its founder Jonah Peretti are good at marketing. Pondering the future of making money selling ads, New York magazine asks this week: "Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?" The answer, as Andrew Rice explains, is yes. But, then, so do you.
In the wake of several scandals, a bunch of Harvardians are calling for a formal honor code that, once implemented and signed by students, would somehow discourage students from cheating, plagiarizing, or otherwise tarnishing the good name of Harvard. Here's why that might, but probably won't, work.
The most powerful state of emptiness in the written word is the humble space. Let us pause and honor it for a moment, as this particular moment provides us with yet another reminder of why we need the space so.
Thieves in the German town of Bad Hersfeld spirited away some 5.5 tons of the chocolate-hazelnut spread over the weekend. But if you can trick one of the top schools in the United States into paying $2,500 per week for Nutella, perhaps everyone should get in the chocolate topping business.
The man who took hostages at Hillary Clinton's campaign office in 2007 briefly escaped from his correctional facility Sunday evening, only to be found less than 24 hours later. So here's how that happened.
Ross Douthat on the consolidation of the elite, Margaret Talbot on Congress's inaction on gun violence, Joel Kotkin on the next American cities, Katherine Stewart on the GOP's position within the culture wars, and Cass R. Sunstein on the virtues of paternalism.
With a cache this massive (and thus far, not that shocking), what you find all depends on what you're searching for — like, say, the Russian predilection for soft rock.
To ring in this year's Holocaust Memorial Day, the classy hackers at Anonymous took down a bunch of Israeli government websites on Sunday and say they caused over $3 billion in damage.
An assassination attempt in Afghanistan on Sunday resulted in the first death of a State Department employee since the war there began.
The details of the bloody back-room deal between Pakistani and American officials that led to the U.S. regularly carrying out unmanned strikes in Pakistan have been shrouded in secrecy, until now, and the reports of the first strike are strange to read now, in retrospect. But what does retrospect mean in America's drone war, anyway?
Forget Louisville and the other three basketball teams competing this weekend whose names some do not wish to know because they weren't in your bracket: the real Final Four action is in Rockville, Maryland, where four teams will battle for collegiate chess supremacy.
The budget for 2014 that President Obama will propose next Wednesday bears all the hallmarks of a man who no longer has to worry about winning an election. There's something in there to piss off everyone — except people who love science! Space science.
The new Pope is hard at work doing the humble thing and trying to stop sex abuse, but that might not be enough to resolve the gap between the views of the Obama administration — and, increasingly, American Catholics — on contraception and the Church's vehement stance against it.
Everyone can agree that it's sickening: Students at a Connecticut high school continue to blame the victim on social media, even as the star athletes and accused rapists sit in prison. But does blaming the problem with rape culture on the new problems of the Internet ignore the cruel way rape victims have been treated in the past? Torrington, it seems, is about to find out.
Because you probably didn't go to Wichita State, and because you'll probably find yourself talked out when it comes to Louisville's Kevin Ware, here's a (not particularly avid) fan's guide to the rest of the weekend in college hoops.
Since senators' announcements of support for gay marriage have gotten dull, the hot new trend in politics is to try and predict which senator will be next to come out into the open on the issue. We looked at the data.
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