According to the lastest commerce data published by retailer Amazon.com, sales of the classic fiction work have spiked 3,100% over the past 24 hours, which have seen fresh reports about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs and the 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee, Edward Snowden, who leaked them.
Arranging a designated driver seems pretty easy, but in practice, according to new research published on Monday in The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, a large percentage of designated drivers swill booze anyway.
According to a new Pew Research study published Thursday, 72 percent of Americans polled, and 85 percent of gay marriage supporters, believe that gay marriage will be written into law — both figures being significantly more, but not that far off, from the number of citizens who don't want marriage equality ... but think it's coming anyway. Hello, SCOTUS, are you there?
The deadly cyclone that struck on Friday in El Reno, Oklahoma, was the second EF5 tornado in less than two weeks to strike the state. It was also the largest twister ever recorded.
After the death of Frank Lautenberg, the United States Senate has now seen a remarkable 299 sitting senators die in office, according to data from the body's website — nearly enough to populate three senates of their own. On average, that's one death every nine months.
Retail conglomerate Walmart agreed to pay $81 million on Tuesday after the company admitted in a San Francisco court to dumping toxic sludge into sanitary sewers throughout the state of California and Missouri. It won't hurt that much, though.
Are we sure this isn't a viral marketing stunt for a remake of To Catch a Thief? About a week after some $1.4 million worth of Chopard jewels were stolen from a hotel during the Cannes Film Festival, a diamond necklace valued at $2.6 million vanished from a swanky party on the French Riviera that hosted the likes of Paris Hilton and Alessandra Ambrosio.
Eric Garcetti will be the new mayor of Los Angeles after only parts of the city went to the polls last night. The turnout was depressingly low for America's second largest metropolis.
The company's selection of chicken and hearty sides is so popular that Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip, where imported goods and travel remain restricted, are willing to pay a team of smugglers to run KFC orders through underground tunnels, usually waiting four or more hours to see their orders fulfilled.
We thought hipsters were dead! Not quite, according to the latest survey from the (attention-starved, but still reliable) folks at Public Policy Polling, which reports that just 10 percent of Americans identify as hipsters — that ill-defined category of urban, overeducated youth — while 50 percent of citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 say they wear the label with pride.
The next bank heist movie just got a lot less interesting. Prosecutors in Brooklyn revealed on Thursday afternoon that eight men successfully organized and executed an elaborate heist involving ... ATMs on the same subway line.
The very horny and very loud insects haven't arrived in full force for the Mid-Atlantic cicada sex invasion quite yet, but when they do, they will come with a huge body-count advantage over people, outnumbering us 600-to-1, or maybe even 20,000-to-1.
After an 11-year study, the CDC has come to a startling conclusion: more people now die in this country by their own hand than from car accidents. And an even more shocking discovery behind the jump — and perhaps a key to the way we think about suicide next — is how many of America's Baby Boomers are taking their own lives.
All that anecdotal password sharing we've been hearing about is more than just a few media savvy friends passing around their logins: One analyst estimates that something like 10 million people watch Netflix Instant, gratis.
Nothing about the federal tax system is especially pleasant: it requires a lot of forms, expends precious mental energy, and of course involves parting ways with your money. But according to a new poll commissioned by The Washington Post, 53 percent of Democrats gave a favorable opinion of the federal tax system; 66 percent of Republicans didn't.
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.
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.
More than five months after two states voted to legalize marijuana — and as a host of other states consider the same — a majority of Americans now say pot should be legal to consume.
The titanically popular HBO series is so well-loved by the cable-less community that 1 million cord-cutters used BitTorrent to download and distribute the premiere. And that's just BitTorrent.
Though the N.C.A.A. remains immensely popular, its older brother has recently lost ground to the 20-year-old MLS. Yes. soccer. The inevitable New York Times trend piece almost writes itself.
No, it's not your imagination: Almost half of the country is getting pounded with snow — even though we're a week into Spring.
The often-controversial animal rights group, known for staging provocative protests involving human props, considers euthanasia "a tragic necessity."
With March Madness play-in games beginning in a few hours — starting with Liberty University and North Carolina AT&T — you may be wondering: what are my chances of predicting a perfect bracket? Your answer awaits.
Today's election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy is notable for two big reasons: he's the first non-European, and the first ordained member of the Society of Jesus, to occupy the highest seat of the Roman Catholic Church, both of which upend millennia of precedent.
Tell that to the judge in New York who just stopped the soda ban.
"Ultimately," the final report from Stuart Bowen, the Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction, suggests, "we estimate that the Iraq program wasted at least $8 billion." Over ten years, that's about $1,500 a minute. Here's where it went.
Moments after the opening bell rang at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average busted through its all-time high water mark.
Nobody knows for sure who will replace Pope Benedict XVI. But a lack of knowledge has never stopped people from gambling on uncertain outcomes, and thousands of people are placing bets, with real money, on potential candidates for the 267th leader of the Catholic Church.
That's according to the eccentric millionaire and space tourist Dennis Tito, who wants to send a man and a woman to travel around Mars and return to the Earth on a mission announced today that's aiming to take off by 2018.
President Obama's exit plan for Afghanistan is growing clearer — but it's not yet certain how many American troops will bear the weight of maintaining peace in post-war Afghanistan. And there's disagreement at a big NATO meeting with Leon Panetta.
Hillary Clinton is reportedly taking home more than $200,000 per speaking event, just days after leaving the State Department. And that's a lot higher than her husband's speaking fee upon leaving the White House, even in today's dollars.
In which we finally answer — or try to answer — the key question haunting our modern, hyper-connected condition: how many of your friends don't use Facebook?
According to the lastest estimate, the Internet consists of trillions of individual pages in hundreds of different languages, but a paper appearing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argues that it takes no more than 19 clicks to navigate from one page to what it estimates to be the 13,999,999,999,999 other publicly accessible web pages out there.
February really is the cruelest month because, on top of all this snow, one is forced to start contemplating death, or at least filling out one's taxes. You might be left scratching your head, and wishing you had a better accountant, when you hear how Facebook is getting hundreds of millions in a tax refund this year.
On Friday afternoon an asteroid known as "2012 DA14" floated by this lonely Earth and, thank God, did not collide with it. But it came close. Not as close as expected, but close.
That's an average of 28 deaths per day, and it's probably a lot more than that.
Halving the number of troops deployed is certainly welcome news for the military — but tonight's State of the Union promise won't resolve the much thornier question of how, and when, to fully extract ourselves from Afghanistan.
More than two-thirds of Americans think we'll land on Mars by 2033. Will we be able to pay for it?
A new poll shows strong public support for banning assault weapons. Here's why that doesn't translate into legislation.
Thanks to the new reality of Super PACs, one in election in America outspent the GDP of Kosovo, a nation of over 1.7 million people.
Everyone knows Congress is unpopular. Now we know how to say that.
It's Jonathan Franzen's worst nightmare, and it's according to a major new study.
The NRA itself, however, remains very popular among its own members, according to the NRA.
But there's a catch to a new AP poll's findings: The surge in support for the new immigration policy came from Republicans.
A new poll finds that more than one-third of Americans agree with a theory about Obama that falls into the "birther" camp, and an overwhelming amount identify themselves as Republicans.
They think the landmark abortion decision dealt with desegregation, the death penalty, or the environment instead.
Given the still-simmering controversy over the House's partial approval of a federal aid bill today — and how many of the affected are still struggling — it's helpful to quantify Sandy's damage along the East Coast shoreline.
Still, the Pentagon argues that suicide rates among military personnel are statistically lower than average.
The tax hike, which takes effect immediately for wages earned in 2013, doesn't have too many fans.
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