Like a lot of other people, I spent a good chunk of last week talking about “The Hunger Games.” Because I’ve written about the books for various publications over the past couple of years, journalists called me up for quotes about the series’ appeal. Along with the usual questions about depictions of violence, the popularity of dystopian narratives in young adult fiction and whether or not Katniss Everdeen is a “good role model” for girls, there usually came a point where the interlocutor observed that the movie was going to make the books hugely popular...

For three decades, filmmaker James Cameron has vividly drawn alien worlds.

On Monday, ocean explorer James Cameron visited one: the bottom of the sea. Nine hours after completing a historic solo dive to the deepest slice of the ocean floor, Cameron described his “very surreal day” in the language of an astronaut...

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You may have caught wind of a controversial series of cartoons from "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau. The issue was a series of cartoons focusing on a Texas law requiring ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

You can't get much more hot-button than this, especially in the wake of issues like Rush Limbaugh's on-air insults directed at a woman, health-care insurance provision of birth control, the fact that it's Women's History Month and the fact that it's a presidential election year.

The day Tommy came out to me, we were walking home from school. He was telling me about Taylor, his most recent crush, when he stopped in the middle of the story, looked up and said, “Mama, you know how you and Mommy are gay?”

I nodded and figured he was going to ask more questions about why we had to get married for the second time.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not. I’m a boy who likes girls.”...

We can’t know who baked the first bagel. The path from when the first circle of malty dough was moved from a vat of boiling water into an oven to now, to you with your lox spread and Sunday paper, is murky.

But we can be sure that Murray Lender, who died Wednesday at 81, was the most important man in the modern history of bagels. Lender’s bagels may taste like white bread with a hole, but what they lack in authenticity they make up for in meaning...

One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon. On the bank above us were some thirty people—short, dark-skinned men, women, and children—some clutching bows and arrows, others with infants on their hips. The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everett—a solidly built man of fifty-five with a red beard and the booming voice of a former evangelical minister—with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it..

In early 2012, the digital revolution entered a new era. The age of mobile, in which people are connected to the web wherever they are, arrived in earnest. A new survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults conducted in January 2012 by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that people are taking advantage of having access to news in their pockets, on their laps and at their desks...

The American intelligence community warned in a report released on Thursday that problems with water could destabilize countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia over the next decade. Increasing demand and competition caused by the world’s rising population and scarcities created by climate change and poor management threaten to disrupt economies and increase regional tensions, the report concludes...

For those of you who have spent the whole of the last week in your local theater watching and rewatching John Carter and so have missed the news cycles, what that scamp Trudeau did this time was to use the platform his strip affords him as a venue for bleak humor about the indignities forced by Texas poobahs – those are male poobahs – on women seeking abortion. Trudeau wasn’t attacking the right-to-lifers per se, but only an unnecessary and humiliating “medical” procedure done down where the stars at night are big and bright...