Ray Bradbury has a vacation house in Palm Springs, California, in the desert at the base of the Santa Rosa mountains. It’s a Rat Pack–era affair, with a chrome-and-turquoise kitchen and a small swimming pool in back. A few years ago, Bradbury let me look through some files stored in his garage as part of my research for a biography. Inside a tiny storage closet I found a compact filing cabinet covered in dust and fallen ceiling plaster, which contained, amid a flurry of tear sheets and yellowing book contracts, a folder marked paris review. In the folder was the manuscript of a remarkable unpublished interview that this magazine had conducted with the author in the late 1970s...

The Kennedy Center fell just short of achieving Tony glory Sunday night as its acclaimed production of “Follies,” considered by some the best musical revival of the Broadway season, lost in the category to a revised version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.”

The Second World War cut millions of live short. One of its victims was a cartoonist and illustrator whose future appeared assuredly bright, but a German artillery shell ended his life...

The most intense phytoplankton bloom recorded on Earth occurred under the Arctic ice last summer - a finding that has stunned seasoned polar scientists.

"The ice was over a metre thick," says Kevin Arrigo at Stanford University, leader of the international team that reported Thursday finding the massive bright green algal bloom beneath the ice...

On a Monday afternoon, Peter Arnett took his class of Chinese journalism students to the outskirts of the southern coastal city of Shantou, to a park dedicated to remembering the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. The memorial’s walls bear descriptions of the killings during the decade-long campaign that Mao Zedong began in 1966 to eradicate what were considered bourgeois elements. Like the memory of the revolution itself, the memorial, which opened in 2005, exists in a gray area. The local media rarely write about it. Few who live in Shantou know it is there. “I bring all of my classes here,” said Mr. Arnett who has visited the site at least a dozen times. “They need to know the truth. It is something they should know.”...

Walter Cronkite's power was considerable and he used it for good. He flourished in the bargain and lived a heck of a life.

None of that will come as news to the world he so reliably informed, but it is carefully and colorfully laid out in "Cronkite" (Harper), the just-released biography by Douglas Brinkley.

The CBS Newsman emerges from its 667 pages in a form that will be fully recognizable to his viewers and admirers: as the intrepid newshound, the reassuring authority, the cultural colossus who called himself "a reluctant big shot," upon whom was thrust the unsought mantle of "most trusted man in America" and who never betrayed that public trust...

In Madrid you see them on the streets, jobless, aimless, often bearing college degrees but working as cabbies, baristas, street performers, or—more often—not at all. In Spain as in Greece, nearly half of the adults under 25 don’t work. Call them the screwed generation, the victims of expansive welfare states and the massive structural debt charged by their parents. In virtually every developed country, and increasingly in developing ones, they include not only the usual victims, the undereducated and recent immigrants, but also the college-educated...

The official position of China’s rulers is that the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 3-4, 1989, is not open for discussion: a student-led “counter-revolutionary rebellion” was put down by security forces. Case closed.

Yet, for an event so thoroughly airbrushed out of view, there was plenty of activity on its 23rd anniversary this week. A candlelight vigil in Hong Kong drew tens of thousands of people, one of the largest gatherings in that city since 1989. Authorities in a Beijing district posted stringent security precautions calling for “wartime systems and protective measures.” When the Shanghai stock market fell 64.89 points Monday — which some Chinese interpreted as an eerie reference to the date of the massacre — censors went into overdrive trying to wipe out any references to it on popular micro­blogs...

Humans are a daydreaming species. According to a recent study led by the Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth, people let their minds wander forty-seven per cent of the time they are awake. (The scientists demonstrated this by developing an iPhone app that contacted twenty-two hundred and fifty volunteers at random intervals during the day.) In fact, the only activity during which we report that our minds are not constantly wandering is “love making.” We’re able to focus for that...

With the end in sight for Hamid Karzai’s days in office as Afghanistan’s president, members of his family are trying to protect their status, weighing how to hold on to power while secretly fighting among themselves for control of the fortune they have amassed in the last decade...