Forget Rahm Emanuel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has “earned the badge of the toughest nut in F***nutsville” and is one of history’s most skilled vote-getters, writes Richard Adams.
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In a break with diplomatic custom, President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netinyahu held closed-door talks yesterday in an attempt to smooth US-Israeli relations.
Carl Varjabedian, a photographic maverick, captures the surreal beauty of the American West in a manner worthy of tall tales and American dreams, writes NPR.
The press didn’t just do a lousy job of explaining the stakes during the healthcare debates, they failed us on a much more fundamental level. According to the Columbia Journalism […]
Edmund White’s eloquent consideration of Cheever in the new New York Review of Books remembers the late author’s connections with Chekhov, his love/hate relationship with Catcher in the Rye, and […]
Set against last weekend’s Washington jamboree organised by pro Israeli AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States, the meeting of senior officials of the United […]
This week’s installment of “The Future in Motion” features a clip from an interview with Dr. Nate Lewis, a chemistry professor at CalTech. He and his team are busy developing […]
This is my 100th post on Mind Matters. Hence the cake in the pic, which was made for a wedding by Seattle’s Jet City Cakes, using H.R. Giger’s designs for […]
Physics is a process of rigorous, exhausting intellectual inquiry, but it does offer occasional moments that are “kind of fun.” For Harvard’s Lisa Randall, one such moment came when she […]
I have often been asked about my thoughts on the recently increased storm activity and global warming. The fact is, you cannot judge a book by its cover, so you […]
What kind of international political influence would the United States have if Barack Obama’s most notable characteristic were his love of haikus? Probably not very much. For the European Union, […]
The New Yorker’s Jill Lapore ponders the rise of marriage therapy in America as well as other dreams of human betterment in a culture that says “Why settle for less than perfection?”
Eating walnuts slows the growth of prostate cancer in mice and has other beneficial effects on the multiple genes related to the control of tumor growth and metabolism.
Four men have agreed to be locked away in a steel container for 18 months in order to simulate a mission to Mars which will test the physical and mental stress of long spaceflight.
Race is a “social concept, not a scientific one” claimed geneticist J. Craig Venter following the discovery that humans share 99.9% of the same genetic code irrespective of our skin color.
The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson says that Barack Obama shows that an American president can be a combination of “strong” and “wrong”.
Holidaymakers in Dubai were recently arrested for kissing in public and could face jail. It seems totally over the top, but should tourists respect the rules of the countries they’re in?
The votes were cast and near-universal health care reform passed by the House. So, the Democrats won a clear victory, right? Not according to Republicans who are also triumphant.
The unsung heroes of the art world who lift and hammer, hang and adjust, got their place in the spotlight this weekend at the first ever Art Handling Olympic championships.
The only privately owned copy of a historic list of names of Jews that were saved from Nazi concentration camps by Oskar Schindler has gone on sale for $2.2 million.
China has condemned Google Inc. which today stopped censoring its China-based search engine and began redirecting users from Google.cn to an uncensored version in Hong Kong.
Here’s a nice thought to start the day: the natural world operates through an endless exchange of life and death. The ecosystem, and all of the organisms it houses, squeezes […]
Media’s big guys generally aren’t doing so well, but as last week’s State of the News Media report found, community and ethnic media continued to grow despite the economic downturn. […]
It’s a truth universally acknowledged around the world that education is good. The higher a people’s schooling, goes the mantra, the better its economic progress, political prospects and gender equality. […]
As Churchill said of democracy (“the worst form of government excepting those already tried,” to paraphrase), so historians might say of marriage—or at least, marriage as conceived in the late […]
Whatever you think of the bill itself, last night’s passage of health care reform is a major achievement for the Democrats. Both Republican and Democratic Congresses have tried to reform […]
I would put Albert Einstein among the 20 top people who have ever lived, in terms of their impact on our way of life. Kings, queens, and emperors have come […]
Last night, House Democrats passed comprehensive health care reform legislation. After decades of fruitless struggle, the U.S. is finally poised to extend insurance to 32 million people and curb the […]
“This is what change looks like,” remarked US President Barack Obama moments after the final House vote passed his universal health care legislation in an historic victory.
For much of the weekend pre-health care House Vote, Republican Bart Stupak was hammering out an executive order making it clear that no federal money would be spent on abortion.