When Colbert asked viewers to pre-order Hachette author Edan Lepucki's upcoming novel California,  the book shot to the top of independent bookstore Powell's sales list. Now Colbert asks fans to help him get the book on the New York Times bestseller list...

First Falluja, then Mosul, and now the oil-refinery town of Bayji. The rapid advance of Al Qaeda-inspired militants across the Sunni heartland of northern and western Iraq has been stunning and relentless—and utterly predictable. Here’s a forecast: the bad news is just beginning...

For all his power and new-found notoriety, there are only two authenticated photos of a man now called the world’s “most powerful jihadi leader.” One shows a serious man with an olive complexion and rounded countenance. The other, released by the Iraqi government last January, depicts an unsmiling bearded figure in a black suit. The image is cracked and blurry, as though someone had taken a picture of a picture...

For a long time now, of course, newsmagazines have borne little resemblance to the sort of publication that was invented at Time in 1923 and loosely replicated at Newsweek ten years later — a magazine designed to present the week’s news succinctly to “busy men” who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers. Starting as strictly a rewrite operation, Time eventually had reporters and stringers around the world...

Like any supersecret lab that’s supposedly trying to invent the future, Google X looks rather nondescript from the street. Besides the occasional hot pink driverless car parked out front, the facility is an archipelago of unmarked, low-slung, redbrick buildings, more Sunset Park than Silicon Valley. Inside, however, whiteboards offer clues about what exactly the future — at least as Google sees it — might look like. And while some diagrams — including one with parts labeled “snooze” and “set time” — suggest more mundane inventions, others, like one outlining a “space elevator,” seem a bit more ambitious...

Since programmers began seriously grappling with the impending reality of intelligent computers in the 1950s, pioneering Inventor Alan Turing said that the first big milestone would come when we cannot distinguish between computers and humans in conversation.

Well, that day has finally come...

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, whose behavior has enraged and mystified so many people, was serving, in 2009, at Outpost Mest Malak, in Paktika Province, in eastern Afghanistan. In recent days, many soldiers in Bergdahl’s platoon have offered a fragmentary impression of what Bergdahl was like. What they haven’t conveyed—what they may not want to convey—is the reality of living and fighting for months at a remote outpost surrounded by hostile members of the Taliban.

But such an account exists—an extraordinarily visceral and intimate record of something very close to Bergdahl’s experience...

Thomas Kinkeade's death shocked his legion of fans -- not only had the Painter of Light died at 54, but the cause was alcohol and Valium. How did the evangelical darling fall so far?

The Pinter of Light was pissed off. It was November 20, 2010, less than two years before he died, and Thomas Kinkade was at the Denver Broncos’ stadium to unveil Mile High Thunder, his painting for the Tim Tebow Foundation...

How a sexed-up viral hit from the summer of 09 -- 1909 -- changed American pop music forever.

In the spring of 1909, American popular song got sexy. Of course, love and courtship, and by extension sex, had been Topic A in pop music for decades. But while songwriters had long trafficked in euphemisms and innuendo—coy talk of “sighing” and “spooning” beneath the old oak tree and by the light of the silvery moon—it was a 1909 hit by composer Harry Von Tilzer and lyricist Jimmy Lucas, “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!,” which opened Tin Pan Alley to brasher, bawdier, more raucously comic songs of lust...

Garry Trudeau had been looking to make the jump from comic strips to TV showrunning, but he didn’t expect to find a home at Amazon. And yet there he was, leading the massive online retailer’s charge into the original series fray when the political satire “Alpha House” launched last fall on the Amazon Instant Video streaming service...