The Massachusetts Senate candidate is both the Republican Party's hope of the moment and supremely disadvantaged against his opponent. This has made him something of a novel figure among his party's national leaders ahead of Tuesday's special election. Like so.
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.
Winter. She's gone, right? She's left us be, and in her stead, here is intelligent, gentle, nurturing, witty, beauteous, sun-on-your-face, breezes-in-your-hair, delightful Spring.
The faculty of Yale University has decided to postpone voting on a controversial modification to the school's grading system — essentially, instituting a grading curve — thus averting a major outcry from Yale's undergraduate body. But still, nearly two-thirds of their grades are getting A's and A-minuses, total. What now?
According to Brendon Ayanbadejo, the outspoken gay rights advocate and now former Baltimore Raven, there are at least three more gay players ready to speak out than previously believed. The Baltimore Sun sort of buries the lead, but there is a vague plan in place for as many as four players to announce publicly that they are gay, and on the same day.
Michael Phillips on the late Roger Ebert, Michael Lind on Obama's Social Security offer, Aaron Ross Powell on the beneficience of government, Matthew Zeitlin on the promise of Bitcoin, and Irin Carmon on Obama's comments on Kamala Harris.
Tim Pernetti reportedly has been forced to resign, but says that if it was up-to-him, coach Mike Rice would have been fired a long time ago.
Will women ever stop giving unasked-for advice to other women about when to get married? And why do we insist on engaging in this cycle? A reflection on the end of the sad "Princeton Mom" meme.
Consider this a win for women's health advocates: U.S. District Judge Edward Korman has ruled that the U.S. government must make the "morning-after" pill available over the counter and available to all ages.
The unemployment rate dropped from 7.7 to 7.6 percent in March, according to data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — but that was the good news.
Six people are dead from the H7N9 strain. The number of infected has grown to to 14. A new scare just hit Hong Kong. The U.S. has begun early research for a vaccine. And now China has slaughtered 20,000 chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons to try and cut off the health risk at the source. So: Is it time to panic yet?
According to newly released court documents, the shooter's psychiatrist contacted University of Colorado authorities about his having "homicidal thoughts" 38 days before he shot and killed 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
Two Texas inmates — one accused of strangling someone with a shoelace — enjoyed little more than two days worth of freedom before U.S. Marshals busted them roughly 20 miles from the prison from which they escaped — and neither man was wearing any pants.
Despite the threats of a nuclear-armed dictator, it doesn't appear that America is ready for a new Cold War. At least, not if bomb shelter sales are any indicator.
Even the Rutgers coach himself said after his termination that "There is no excuse — I was wrong." But that didn't stop Hannity and Malkin from making excuses and saying that the coach's treatment of his student-athletes wasn't that bad.
Recent killings of law enforcement officials are horrible, shocking news. But there's little reason to think that it marks a new trend, despite the media's shark-attack-style coverage.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ben Carson's sudden fame, Amy Davidson on David Brooks's philosophy of freedom, Jeremy Kessler on the national character of gay marriage, Lionel Tiger on the abusive Rutgers basketball coach, and James Kirchick on being a provocative art exhibit.
Even though the man who is believed to have killed the head of Colorado's prison system was also shot and killed by police, authorities say they are now on the lookout for two more members of his white supremacist gang.
Lululemon, the upscale yoga clothing retailer, is letting their chief product officer go after a high-profile mishap in mid-March involving the company's yoga pants, thousands of which were pulled from stores after the company discovered a manufacturing error that had rendered the pants's fabric too transparent.
Is the Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich unhealthy? Or rather, just how unhealthy is it? According to a spokeswoman for Dunkin Donuts, the item weighs in at ... 360 calories. Which, considering its ingredients, is actually surprising!
A long, long, long time ago (like, last year) I wrote an obituary for the word artisanal. It seemed high time to declare it dead and get on with our lives. And yet, it has become clear in the months that have followed that artisanal is not dead. Artisanal may, instead, be undead.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a word of warning: many teenagers are wantonly breaking the law every day by reading news sites on the web because the Department of Justice's weird implementation of vague laws has left a number of media outlets with odd age-based legal prohibitions.
Any reader of George Eliot is familiar with Britain's class system, by which Britons sort themselves, either ironically or seriously, into rigidly-defined castes, based on things like education, type of employment, and wealth. In order to sort out the confusion inherent to such a system, the BBC wrote an interactive calculator to determine which class you belong to.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder does not look the same in boys and girls. Women with the disorder tend to be less hyperactive and impulsive, more disorganized, scattered, forgetful, and introverted. The misunderstanding stem from the early studies of the disorder which, a research says, "were based on really hyperactive young white boys."
Let's say you're a state and you want, for some reason, to declare an official government religion. Simple: Decide that your state gets to interpret the Constitution however it sees fit.
Drinking in the office is really not all it's cracked up to be. Drinking in the office sort of sucks, and not only because none of your coworkers are Roger Sterling and Don Draper.
Ben Howe on the quality of conservative entertainment, Donna Brazile on Susan Patton's advice for women, Marin Cogan on Rubio's immigration plan, Michael Wolff on Christopher Hitchens's legacy, and John Podhoretz on academia's attraction to danger.
Texas authorities have identified a "person of interest" in their investigation of the slayings of two district attorneys, but this new lead could take the case in another direction.
Every day hundreds of South Korean workers make their way across a special border crossing to work at a North Korean industrial complex that is jointly run by both nations. But not today.
Well, this is embarrassing. Three weeks after trying to contain a scandal involving spying on administrator's email accounts, Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammands just admitted to spying spying on faculty too.
When the obscure airline Samoa Air announced on Tuesday that it would begin charging passengers by how much they weighed, you had to wonder: Would such a practice ever catch on at, say, American Airlines? Could it? Think not of the emotions. Think of the logistics.
Fannie Mae, the government-funded mortgage lender, paid $7.6 billion back into the government's pocketbook in 2012. That's good news, and it inspired us to check in on the government's other semi-willing recession-era investments. With charts.
The short answer, after he left an Indiana hospital Tuesday to join the Cardinals in Atlanta this weekend, is yes — but not for a while, and the fallout could have been worse for another player.
About 90 million Americans believe aliens exist. Some 66 million of us think aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. These are the things you learn when there's a lull in political news and pollsters get to ask whatever questions they want.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and today marks the kickoff of a new program focused on Laurie Halse Anderson's classic Y.A. novel Speak, which tells the story of a high school girl coping in the aftermath of being raped.
Two inmates — one accused of strangling someone with a shoelace — used their feet to make a mad dash to freedom Tuesday when they successfully broke out of a Texas prison.
After three assassinations in two months, top law enforcement officials are concerned that white supremacist prison gangs may be targeting them.
Catherine Rampell in The New York Times on paid paternity leave, Francesca Mari on Jill Lepore's American history, Farhad Manjoo on technological cynicism, Alison Gash on gay adoption, and Megan McArdle on college admissions.
Despite a brief spike in interest after the Sandy Hook shootings, Americans care less about gun control than ever, even as gun control passes in Connecticut and stumbles through the Senate. Sounds like a great time for the NRA to stage another PR stunt! And that's exactly what the NRA is doing on Tuesday.
The case of the white supremacist suspected of killing the head of Colorado's prison system and a pizza man just got weirder. Apparently, a clerical error enabled the alleged killer to leave jail four years early.
The owner of a New York City apartment is accusing former tenant Arianna Huffington of trashing the place, leaving bloodied mattresses, gouged wood floors and a very expensive scratched up table.
According to Bill Kristol and Rick Santorum and other pundits, there's one reason for a surge in American support for gay marriage: television. But the question is: Which television show? We crunched the numbers. Sort of.
On a day full of enough bad jokes across the Web, and stunts from Google, and accidents in newspapers, and horrifying bunnies at the White House, these nine stories cut through the debate on April Fool's Day — whether they seemed fake or not, believe it: They were just patently absurd enough headlines from our world to be the actual news of April 1, 2013.
Exxon moved quickly to put up oil containment booms, and there are no reports that any oil has entered Lake Conway in Arkansas. Or, rather, not oil. What spilled is a product called "diluted bitumen," or "dilbit" — the watered-down product of a fuel extracted from oil sands.
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