In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream...

Reg Smythe was the greatest British newspaper strip cartoonist of the 20^th Century – and second only to Peanuts’ Charles Schulz on a global scale. So why don’t we treat him that way?
Smythe invented Andy Capp for the Daily Mirror in 1957, personally writing, drawing, inking and lettering every line of the 15,000 Andy cartoons he produced over the following 40 years. When he died in 1998, the strip was syndicated to 1,700 newspapers – 1,000 in America alone – translated into 14 languages and read by a combined audience of 250 million...

The fact that a history of racial integration at Saturday Night Live can fit within the confines of a Slate article is, in itself, a pretty clear indication of the problem at hand. And the current struggles with race in Studio 8H offer us a sadly useful illustration of what’s wrong with “diversity” in this country generally.

"I met with some of the most famous and important figures of Europe, America, India, Korea and Turkey ... And here I am now looking for a loaf of stale bread to eat." In 2011, the letter's author, Ahmed Maher, played a central role in the movement that deposed former President Hosni Mubarak and earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for his work toward democratic reform through peaceful revolution. Today, he is kept in solitary confinement under maximum security surveillance, and only permitted two hours a day outside of the cell, according to Michelle McElroy, a human rights activist and spokeswoman for Maher. Since his imprisonment in December, he has managed to smuggle out more than 10 letters, scrawled on toilet paper and napkins...

On his eighth trip to fight with the rebels in Syria, in August, Abu Khattab saw something that troubled him: two dead children, their blood-soaked bodies sprawled on the street of a rural village near the Mediterranean coast. He knew right away that his fellow rebels had killed them...

“If I believe I am being gamed…,” President Barack Obama said, in a “blast” at an unhappy meeting about Afghanistan in March, 2011; that’s how Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, remembers it, according to early reports on his memoir. (Bob Woodward and Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post and Thom Shanker at the Times got their hands on copies of the book, which comes out next week.)...

Producer Dana Brunetti, who grew up in Covington, is one of the masterminds behind the Netflix original series "House of Cards." It turns out that Amazon Studios' rival enterprise "Alpha House," available through the online retailer's Amazon Prime service, has a major regional tie, too: Alicia Sable, who plays Tammy Stackhouse, the chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Gil John Biggs (John Goodman), is a Giles County native.

"This is my first series, and I can honestly say 'Alpha House' is like a giant family," Sable wrote in an email. "From the producers, to the Amazon executives, to the crew, everyone is so kind and nurturing."...

Look, I never want to tell stories about my children, because it always seems a little lazy. Children tend to be sort of dumb, and, in the end, the stories are always the same: children say hilarious things, and I am old and dying.

So when I tell you these stories about my children let’s just pretend they are about my cats...

In this rural part of the Panhandle, Christopher Mitchell finds few takers when he delivers his message about the importance of exploring insurance options under the federal health overhaul. People in the conservative-leaning area tend to have a bad impression of President Obama's signature law because of negative messages they hear on talk radio or from friends, said Mitchell, marketing director for a network of nonprofit health clinics...

In room-size metal boxes ­secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park, Md...