Toward the beginning of the 2012 comedy 21 Jump Street, Officer Jenko (Channing Tatum), a onetime cool kid, gives his partner some advice as they prepare to infiltrate the ranks of the cool kids at Sagan High. “You gotta one-strap it,” Jenko chides Officer Schmidt (Jonah Hill). Schmidt, a onetime nerd, is two-strapping—wearing his backpack over both shoulders. That is not, warns Jenko, what cool kids do.

\This advice may sound obvious to all cool kids of a certain age, but when the officers make their debut at school, times have changed. Jenko’s attitude—“I don’t care about anything,” he announces—has gone out of style. The cool kids are into diversity, environmentalism, and, worst of all, trying. And symbolizing this generational sea change: “Everybody’s two-strapping it,” notes Schmidt...

For years I wanted “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary; he’s 20 times more interesting and engaged than any columnist I read. Similarly, I wanted Bill Watterson, of “Calvin and Hobbes” fame, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature...

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God." Seven months earlier, Rafael Cruz, speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son, who was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God," and he urged the crowd to send Obama "back to Kenya."...

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in central Kenya in 1992 when something suddenly caused her to freeze in her tracks. "I stopped just in front of a cobra," she says. "It was raised with its hood spread out."

Isbell, who is at the University of California, Davis, says she has spent the past couple of decades trying to understand how she could have reacted before her conscious brain even had a chance to think — cobra!...

Maybe the most astute observer of Amazon.com’s daring foray into television production is Clark Johnson.

He’s one of those journeyman actors who is immediately recognizable to television viewers, even if he’s not a household name. Johnson, who has starred in such hits at NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” and HBO’s “The Wire,” is working on his latest project, “Alpha House,” produced for Amazon Studios.

The comedy about four Republican congressmen who share a Washington, D.C., house was created by “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau and stars Hollywood veteran John Goodman. Amazon put the pilot on its website in April to get feedback from viewers...

Born during the hostage crisis days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the chant “Death to America” has enjoyed a long run on the Iranian stage. But it has been getting a little threadbare in recent times, and has even come under threat, with no less a person than the newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, suggesting that the country no longer needed slogans...

It was a humbling experience for the chief executive of the world’s most valuable company. Hauled before a Senate panel, Apple’s Tim Cook had to explain how an American company whose American engineers had created the iPhone and the iPad was able to avoid paying any taxes on billions of dollars in profits generated by those products — not to United States, not to any country. The only defense the Cook could conjure up for Apple “stateless” income was that it was all perfectly legal...

arah Kendzior, Al-Jazeera English’s firebrand of social and economic justice, suggested this week that there should be a Norton Anthology of Academics Declaring They Quit, among whose august contributions she would place Zachary Ernst’s “Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower.” Ernst’s Oct. 20 essay is a deeply honest account of his acrimonious departure from what many would consider a dream job: a tenured position as a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri...