If one were asked to pick a typical home where the buffalo roam, the answer probably would not be Litchfield County amid the rolling hills and understated rural chic of Northwest Connecticut.

But when Bison No. 7 on Peter Fay’s farm gave birth to a white, 30-pound bull calf a month ago, it made the Fay farm below Mohawk Mountain, for the moment at least, the unlikely epicenter of the bison universe...

Let’s get one thing straight: I never wanted to be Mr. Unemployment. It’s important to clear this up because, several months after I was laid off from my job of 18 years at a large media company, I wrote a piece for this magazine headlined “Terminated.” Up to the point of its publication, I was adrift, getting nowhere. Most companies didn’t even respond to my inquiries about openings. I even applied for a job making up and distributing fliers, figuring at least I’d be writing. In a year, I thought, someone would pass me on the street and shout, “Hey, what are you doing with yourself since they fired your butt?” and I would yell across traffic, “I’m a flier writer.”

“What??!”...

Former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno and the senior leadership at the university covered up incidents of child sexual abuse on the Penn State campus by a former assistant football coach, showing “total disregard for the safety and welfare of the victims,” a team of investigators concluded in findings released Thursday morning.

In a prepared statement that preceded the release of a 162-page report, former FBI director Louis Freeh, who along with his law firm conducted an independent review of the circumstances surrounding the scandal, blamed Paterno and university officials for “catastrophic failures” that were reinforced by a Board of Trustees that had failed to create an environment of accountability...

It’s impossible to predict the exact speed and severity with which climate change will unfold, but one thing is clear: if we take no preventive action, eventually we’ll be tempted to take desperate action. And over the decades, as the effects of climate change grow increasingly severe, the amount of risk humankind is willing to bear will increase...

In a grainy video that shocked viewers around the world, a young woman named Najiba shrouded in a gray shawl sits alone on a hillside surrounded by men with guns and waits to be executed. Now Afghan activists are stepping out and speaking out in solidarity with the murdered young woman to press their government to take violence against women far more seriously—and to demand some say in whatever peace with the Taliban might come.

Afghan activists quickly organized a march today in Kabul for several hundred women and men aimed at bringing attention to Najiba’s killing, alleged to have come at the hands of the Taliban. Details surrounding the circumstances of the woman’s murder at close range remain murky, but the story involves two commanders said to be involved with the young woman and a decision to settle the matter at gunpoint by killing her without any kind of trial for the crime of “adultery.”...

I thought I'd nailed it, when I wrote what could be the first original Higgs Boson joke ever here.

But since this week's announcement that the Higgs particle has been found, there's been a wave of Higgs humor on Twitter, a lot of it curated by Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, whose battle with breast cancer led her to tweet: "Gonna start calling my post-mastectomy, science-rebuilt cyberboob the "Higgs Bosom."

To be funny about something you usually have to understand it well. But sometimes it's the difficulty of understanding something that makes it funny.

From @pourmecoffee: "Higgs Boson Explainer: It's like, a particle, man."...

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River.

A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old...

oday New York City is the Big Apple of the Northeast but new research reveals that 500 years ago, at a time when Europeans were just beginning to visit the New World, a settlement on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in Canada, was the biggest, most complex, cosmopolitan place in the region.

Occupied between roughly A.D. 1500 and 1530, the so-called Mantle site was settled by the Wendat (Huron). Excavations at the site, between 2003 and 2005, have uncovered its 98 longhouses, a palisade of three rows (a fence made of heavy wooden stakes and used for defense) and about 200,000 artifacts. Dozens of examples of art have been unearthed showing haunting human faces and depictions of animals, with analysis ongoing...

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed -- and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness...

On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego,” Haggis wrote. Before the 2008 elections, a staff member at Scientology’s San Diego church had signed its name to an online petition supporting Proposition 8, which asserted that the State of California should sanction marriage only “between a man and a woman.” The proposition passed. As Haggis saw it, the San Diego church’s “public sponsorship of Proposition 8, which succeeded in taking away the civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens of California—rights that were granted them by the Supreme Court of our state—is a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally. Our public association with that hate-filled legislation shames us.” Haggis wrote, “Silence is consent, Tommy. I refuse to consent.” He concluded, “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.”...