The Sean Bell case in New York has thrown a big spotlight on American big-city police and policing. An unarmed man on the morning of his wedding day — no crime, no offense –cut down in a hail of 50 police bullets, and last week all officers cleared in the case.
Peter Moskos is watching closely. [...]

The Australian Rupert Murdoch, global press baron, plays hardball and big money with the news media on several continents. These days, he’s up to his elbows in American media.
If you read The Wall Street Journal, which he now owns, you’ve seen the changes. Whether you watch or avoid Fox News, you know its impact. And [...]

The story of American music is, in many ways, the story of discovery and rediscovery of blues and gospel and country rolling into rock and pop and Aaron Copeland.
But one American musical tradition is so old and so other-worldly that it’s hardly ever touched the modern mainstream. It’s called Sacred Harp — and the harp [...]

“He does not speak for me,” says Barack Obama, of his former Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But Jeremiah Wright keeps speaking anyway.
After weeks of lying low, in the past week Rev. Wright has been all over: with Bill Moyers Friday night, preaching in Dallas and speaking before the NAACP on Sunday, taking questions at [...]

Former U.S. Secretary of State — and Treasury, and Labor — George Shultz has been mixing it up with the great powers of Washington and the world since the Eisenhower administration.
As Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state he became a hero to conservatives and more for his role in ending the Cold War. Now, at 87, [...]

We’ve heard it again and again, but seldom laid out with the clarity Steven Greenhouse brings. The American worker is getting crunched. Corporate profits are up. Productivity is up. CEO pay is way up. But the American worker is getting squeezed.
Greenhouse is labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times. He’s brought home the [...]

It’s a question many of us probably ask ourselves, or the ones we love: How would we prefer to die? In our sleep, perhaps, on our 100th birthday? Not young, anyway. Not in pain.
But then the broader question, in a country that tries to defy mortality, may be: what is a “good” or “timely” death?
Journalist [...]

A week of soaring prices and a huge primary win. Hillary Clinton hung in, and the campaign moved on to Indiana and North Carolina. General Petraeus got the nod to ship out to a higher post.
The U.S. made striking claims about Syrian-North Korean nuclear ties. President Bush set the table for more Mid-East peace talks.
Rupert [...]

Here’s a conundrum for you: a smaller portion of American households include married couples than ever before — a minority now, says the Census Bureau, just 47 percent. But among Americans who are married, the spouse is being leaned on now — more than ever before — to be everything: lover, confidant, life partner, best [...]

With fuel costs skyrocketing, and just in time for summer, the airline industry is again facing monumental losses. Just this week United, JetBlue and AirTran announced sharp losses, and Delta reported a first quarter loss of $6 billion.
The airlines are cutting everything they can: employees, flights, fleets, and frills. If you’re a traveler, prepare to [...]

For a long time, American well-being has been measured by GDP. By personal income. By cold, hard numbers. Not anymore.
Now, a field of economic study — the measurement of happiness — is coming of age. It’s providing new insights into who we are, and the roots of what really makes us happy. Money, politics, family, [...]

It ain’t over — again. Hillary Clinton pulls out a win in Pennsylvania and sends Barack Obama and superdelegates a double-digit message: Don’t count me out.
And so, the battle for the Democratic nomination goes on, and on, and on, and on. In two weeks, primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.
On paper, the math and money [...]

William Damon is one of the world’s leading scholars on adolescence and human development. And when he looks around the world, he sees a growing problem.
It’s not just that young adults don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. It’s not simply that they won’t leave home. No, it’s that and more: [...]

Warming in last decades has pushed spring forward — cherry blossom and lilac festivals across the country now celebrated days earlier than ever before. It also means birds are laying eggs earlier than before, or — sometimes — not at all.
It’s this kind of subtle mistiming that could spell disaster for our environment, jeopardizing the [...]

Perfumes are more than a scent. They are a state of mind — at least that what all the ads tell us.
A little dab here and you’re picnicking in fields of wild flowers, or experiencing the blush of first love. A spritz there and you’re rolling in satin sheets, and feeling oh so Hollywood. Dab [...]

Tomorrow, Pennsylvanians go to the polls. For weeks Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been courting the Keystone state nonstop. The candidates have bowled, and traded bitter barbs on everything from patriotism, Iraq, small town America, and each other’s character.
We are all about Pennsylvania today, too — bringing Pennsylvanians to the microphone to tell us [...]

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Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that [...]

Man walks into a restaurant and asks: “How do you prepare your chickens?” And the cook responds: “Nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.” Bada boom. The human condition in a two-line joke about chickens.
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein see philosophy today all over the world of humor. A world where Woody [...]

Protests galore. This week it seems like everyone has something to shout about.
American Airlines leaves thousands of passengers stranded. The Olympic torch lands in San Francisco under heavy security. General Petraeus argues for a halt in Iraq troop withdrawals.
Police remove 400 children from a polygamist compound in Texas. Mark Penn leaves the Clinton campaign — [...]

You’ve heard it a thousand times in recent years: being a citizen of the developed world — and especially a citizen of the United States of America — is bad for the planet. We all know we produce too much carbon, but it’s hard to know exactly how, and how much.
Now a new documentary from [...]

Next week Pope Benedict makes his first papal visit to the United States. He won’t come wagging his finger at a country in moral decline, as some may expect. We’re told he will come with a gentle message, eager to share his church’s values of honesty and love of faith.
But the big question is how [...]

China’s big road to the Olympics is turning into a hard course in global pushback and big power comeuppance. The image of the Olympic torch being hustled through a rolling hail of protest over Tibet and human rights is clearly excruciating for Beijing.
But while the torch gets hustled, Chinese wealth and power continues to mount. [...]

In the long parade of US senators questioning General David Petraeus on Capitol Hill yesterday, there were three who were not like the others.
Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama are running for president. One of them will almost certainly sit in the Oval Office next January as commander in chief. Patraeus’s commander. That gives [...]

Last September on Capitol Hill, General David Petraeus changed the tenor of the American conversation on Iraq with his report that a US troop surge had coincided with a dramatic fall in violence in Iraq.
This week, on the path now to a US presidential election - with Iraq as a major issue - Petraeus is [...]

For two days this week on Capitol Hill, America’s top general and top diplomat in Iraq are briefing Congress on the state of the Iraq War. They sat down first this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker face supporters and critics on the Hill. The US troops surge [...]

Frederick Hitz got out of college, taught in Africa for a year, practiced some law, didn’t like it. Joined the CIA. Became a spy. Now, decades later, he’s hoping other bright young Americans will do the same.
But the world has changed since James Bond was the fantasy and Tom Clancy wrote his tales. It’s tougher [...]

When Wall Street giant Bear Stearns was on the ropes last month, it took the federal government less than two days to leap in and guarantee a bailout for a bank with a reputation for playing fast and loose in the markets.
With millions of homeowners around the country up against foreclosure and millions of homes [...]

Yankee Stadium is coming down this year. It’s the last season for the House that Babe Ruth built. First put up in 1923. Got rehabbed in 1976. And now, it’s going down.
The site where Knute Rockne said “Win one for the Gipper.” (Yes, they played football there, too). Where Joe DiMaggio began his 56-game hitting [...]

News all over, but this airline business really got my goat this week. Yes, Bush is off wrangling with NATO, Europe looks more tuned in to Putin than our President some days, McCain and Clinton are in a jokey mood, Obama’s still packing on super-delegates, Zimbabwe may throw off a dictator.
But our Federal Aviation Administration [...]

Through nearly 20 years of wild ups and downs, Aaron David Miller was in the middle of American efforts to broker Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East. He saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of our efforts, and theirs.
Now he’s out of the bubble, and talking. Very frankly. About how Americans have lost [...]

It’s a jungle out there in the U.S. economy these days. Wall Street all over the place, mainly down. Investment banks writing off billions in losses. Housing still tumbling.
Everybody’s got a band-aid or a bail-out to propose, but they all cost money — and some may do more harm than good.
We’re sitting down this hour [...]

Science writer George Johnson is in love with the science of the old days — before super-colliders and supercomputers and terabytes of data to be churned.
When he thinks of the beauty of science, he thinks of the simple, shattering experiments of Galileo and Newton, Pavlov and Faraday.
Until very recently, he says, the most earthshaking science [...]

Between the war and the economy, it looked like a slam-dunk year for Democrats and the White House. It may still be.
But the long-slog trench warfare between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has some Democrats scared that it’s slipping away. That John McCain is making hay while the Dems duke it out.
Bill Clinton now says, [...]

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.
For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the [...]

What just happened in Iraq?
A week ago, prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and central government troops charged into the southern oil port of Basra, vowing to clean up the town and laying down a tough deadline for rogue militiamen to surrender their arms.
President Bush hailed the move as bold and necessary, “a defining moment” for Iraq.
Then, [...]