At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators...

Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why — to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay...

With the death of Maya Angelou, we lose the immense wisdom of the celebrated African American author, poet and civil activist. These quotes say a lot about who she was and what she stood for...

"Nothing will work unless you do."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

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In 1943 the war looked unwinnable for the Allies. Marc Wortman on historian Paul Kennedy's story of how unsung innovators turned the tide...

Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, like Krazy Kat, appealed to a smaller audience than most comic strips.  Comics historian Ron Goulart says it appeared in only 52 newspapers in the U.S. at its height. But the strip’s readers were an appreciative elite.  Barnaby hove into public view a scant two years before the demise of the intelligentsia’s first love, Krazy Kat.  Beginning April 20, 1942, the strip lasted into the early fifties. It was revived on September 12, 1960 and ran until April 14, 1962, but many of the stories were retooled from the first run of the strip, which ended February 2, 1952. By that time, both Pogo andPeanuts were on the scene.

The brief decade of Barnaby’s first run was brilliant. Among its passionate fans was Dorothy Parker...

For most of my life, if I've thought at all about the bacteria living on my skin, it has been while trying to scrub them away. But recently I spent four weeks rubbing them in. I was Subject 26 in testing a living bacterial skin tonic, developed by AOBiome, a biotech start-up in Cambridge, Mass. The tonic loks, feels and tastes like water, but each spray bottle of AO+Refreshing Cosmetic Mist contains billions of cultiated Nitrosomonas eutropha...

...A reporter recently got an early look at roughly 170 linear feet of manuscripts, reporter's notebooks, newspaper clippings, sketches and other materials, much of it kept by Mr. Wolfe in elegant orange Queen Bee file boxes made in Richmond, Va., his birthplace...

Over 20 years ago, a lost recording of J.R.R. Tolkien was discovered in a basement in Rotterdam, but the man who found it kept this importanbt reel-to-reel tape hidden away. Until recently, only he had heard the recording. But now, I am one of those luck Middle-earth lovers who has listened to this magical magnetic tape, and I happily declare that it is awesome. For it proves once and for all that Professor Talkien was, in fact, very much the hobbit that we all suspected him to be...

Every afternoon when Trey left school in his car, two white patrolmen would follow him in their cruiser, sometimes a few blocks, sometimes several miles, before turning on their patrol lights...

Conservationists did everything they could to save Mountain Bull, the legendary Kenyan elephant...But in the end, it simply wasn't enough...