My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us.

The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapists, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better.

Kurdistan is the safest and most stable region in Iraq and at the center of its modern history is Amna Surak Prison, ground zero for both a genocide and an uprising.

Madrid, 1937:

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

Her 4th day of college was a mass shooting. Here is what life is like afterward.

The next frontier of search is… everything. Voice recognition, image recognition, and why Google’s data set is one of the most valuable scientific tools of our age.

One of the founders of Google discovered that he carried a gene that meant a 50% chance of developing Parkinson’s. In response, he is working to change and expedite the way that Parkinson’s research is conducted.

“The remains of a sunken village nearby make me realize that the process is inexorable. Of this seventy-five-house village, there is almost nothing left.”

“Which is the largest country in the world, economically speaking? It’s America, the United States. Do you know why? Because way back—this is history, you can look it up on the Internet—the colonization was done by men who believed in the word of God. And they were tithers. That’s why you see on the dollar bill: ‘In God we trust.”

On the science of being fooled.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.

The president is overseeing a sea change in the world of economic policy, and so much hangs in the balance.

The French influence in Africa is on the wane, and the Chinese are coming.

How the former Bush advisor is “reengineering the practice of partisan money management in hopes of drumming Barack Obama out of the White House.”

A central Massachusetts city enabled the author’s ancestors to move into the good life of the middle class. That move is more complicated today.

“What happens when the thing that might save you is also the thing that might destroy the world?”

A profile of the leader of America’s bobsled team, who is competing in the Olympics months after the death of his mentor.

Why is Rick DeVos, the son of Betsy and the heir to the DeVos fortune, investing in a weirdly populous and highly lucrative art contest?

Over the next decade, the number of elderly homeless Americans is projected to triple.

Katharine Hayhoe is one of the country’s most influential atmospheric scientists, spreading the word about the effects of climate change. She’s also an evangelical Christian.

The science on the link is clear, but the alcohol industry has worked hard to downplay it.

“It is overwhelmingly young people of color, and those who work in their schools, who will bear the brunt of these closings and witness the worst effects of the budget cuts. Over the last six months, the SDP and the state of Pennsylvania have decided, again and again, that this is acceptable.”

Rosario Crocetta is a reform-minded leader in a highly corrupt place that hates change. That’s only one of the reasons his life is in danger.

"It is one thing for you to get a correct image, and it is another thing for me to spoil my life."

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.