“Subjects.” That’s what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies. But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were [...]
July 2, 2010
Flying Car? Yes, this Flying Car is for real. The Terrafugia Transition has been approved by the FAA. It can soon be yours for just under $200,000. Flying-car enthusiasts are justified in their pessimism: For the past hundred years or so, they’ve repeatedly been promised that a future with a personal aircraft in every garage [...]
June 3, 2010
Images on TV and the internet continually tick off the number of gallons of crude oil leaking into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the numbers are quickly becoming unfathomable to us in our daily lives. We have no reference point for tens of millions of gallons, except to know that’s a lot [...]
April 19, 2010
He never told a lie, as the story goes. So maybe if he were alive today, President George Washington could tell a New York City library what he did with two books he checked out 221 years ago. The two books — weighty discourses on international relations and parliamentary debates — were checked out on [...]
April 19, 2010
BEIRUT — A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes. Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and [...]
November 23, 2009
Thomas E. Mahany, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, is staging a hunger strike in Lafayette Square across from the White House to raise awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder and protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing weird about that. I applaud his efforts. The weird part comes from not being able to find any media [...]
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July 3, 2010
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