Nearly every Wednesday in Rome, the faithful and the curious gather in St. Peter's Square for a general audience with the pope. Since the election of the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio last March, attendance at papal events has tripled to 6.6 million. On a recent chilly morning in December, the thousands of amassed pilgrims appear to gleam in the sunlight, covering the square like a pixelated carpet. Maybe it's all the smartphones raised to the heavens...

When he became a teenager, Wonarllevyston Garlan Marllon Branddon Bruno Paullynelly Mell Oliveira Pereira did what any self-conscious person worried about merciless taunting from his peers might do: He pleaded with his parents and the courts to let him change his name.

“I never had anything in common with Marlon Brando,” he said, referring to the American actor for whom he was partially named. So with the permission of his parents and the legal system, he whittled down his nine names to an economical four, Bruno Wonarleviston Oliveira Pereira...

Fact-checking Obama's 2014 State of the Union...

Advertisers and marketing experts know that in the typical household, the woman is the primary shopper. Whether they are selling cars or light bulbs or groceries, they have to appeal to women, their consumer base.  

The same goes for organizations selling fear and worry: If they want to attract converts to their cause, they have to convince women to embrace their views and join them in agitating for action. And so it goes for activists opposed to the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), who bombard women with misinformation about food safety...

From "Cannabranders" to The Medicine Man, everyone's rushing to cash in on the green in colorful Colorado.

“The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades,” croons Peter Williams, the 46-year-old chief of operations at a Denver dispensary that hopes to be known as the IKEA of Weed...

Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action...

There are ways in which now might be considered a golden age of kids’ music. At the Grammys this week, some excellent recordings were nominated, many with well-produced and well-written songs that speak directly to the experiences of growing up. Funny, thoughtful, and catchy, there is a wealth of rich material to choose from.

Pete wasn’t about that, though. He was about singing together. Better than anyone I can think of he promoted the power and pleasure that comes from being in a room with a bunch of other people making a coordinated sound, filling the air and heart with ancient, mysterious, and yet direct and tangible energies of connection and joy. This is what is most important to me when I perform. I want us all to have an experience of singing...

Herbert Block—better known by the pseudonym “Herblock”—was not the most visually imaginative or bitingly satirical American editorial cartoonist of the 20th century. That was Paul Conrad, who had the honor of being the only member of his profession to make Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” Nor was he the funniest, or the most influential in terms of inspiring imitators: Both Pat Oliphant and the late Jeff MacNelly have him beat there.

But from his perch at the Washington Post, which he held onto from his discharge from the U. S. Army in 1956 until his death in the fall of 2001, Herblock created and sustained a sort of perfect image of the ideal op-ed cartoonist: Intelligent and sane with no ax to grind...

“I must say to you,” President Gerald Ford said to us, in 1975, “that the state of the Union is not good.” In the same spirit of candor, I must say to you that the state of the State of the Union is not good. I don’t mean tomorrow night’s speech. I mean the State of the Union Message as an institution. This may not rise to the level of economic inequality as a national problem, but the speech is no less in need of fixing.

The litany of grievances about the State of the Union is as long as the litany of proposals, ideas, appeals, and admonitions that the speech always contains...

Last year, Edward Snowden turned over to the Guardian, a British newspaper, some 58,000 classified U.S. government documents. Just a fraction of the files have been made public, but they outline the National Security Agency’s massive information-collection system. They’ve thrown light onto the methods of an arm of the government used to working in the shadows and started an intense debate over national security and personal liberty. One of the earliest and most explosive revelations was the existence of Prism, a top-secret program giving the NSA direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, and other U.S. Internet companies...