As the early adopters among us massage their new iPads this weekend, they might want to hearken back to when a computer was a room, and the only thing you touched was a punch-card. Here are our favorite stories from the computer’s early days...

Garry Trudeau has famously kicked up a fuss this week by using his Doonesbury strip to tackle the ultrasound mandates that states like Virginia and Texas have passed for women seeking abortions. I read an interview Trudeau did in the Washington Post and wondered if he might be up for answering a few more questions. To my fan-girl joy, he said yes. Here is our exchange over email...

Setting off in the predawn gloaming of central Alaska, we were the sounds of swishing snow pants, crunching boots and cold puffs of breath. As sunrise gradually lightened the late November sky, we took visible shape: a single-file parade on a narrow white trail traveling west, deeper into Denali National Park and Preserve. It was three degrees and so still that when we pulled up to rest, I heard no wind, no sibilant leaves, just a barely perceptible ringing in my ears. Tundra swans, kestrels and warblers had all flown south. Grizzlies were asleep in their dens. We tramped over frozen streams and paused to discover water still trickling faintly in hollows below...

It was one week ago, of course, that Garry Trudeau first spoke about his then-upcoming abortion-law “Doonesbury” strips, when he told Comic Riffs that for him to avoid the vaginal-ultrasound debate would have been “comedy malpractice.”

Now that (most of) the dust has settled in the cartoon kerfuffle heard ‘round the media-political complex, it’s a fair time to see just how all this shook out...

President Hamid Karzai chastised the United States on Friday, saying that he was at “the end of the rope” over what he termed the United States’ lack of cooperation in investigating the American soldier accused of going on a rampage earlier this month and killing 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan...

Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.

The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to "tighten the security grip" on the opposition-held city in November...

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it...

As a member of a heavily male- and GOP-dominated state Senate since 2008, Ohio legislator Nina Turner says she has cringed watching her colleagues pass bill after bill to regulate women's reproductive health. Now, the Democrat has become the latest in a series of female state legislators to give her male colleagues a taste of their own medicine by introducing a bill that limits men's ability to get a Viagra prescription without meeting certain government conditions.

"We should show the same attention and love to men's reproductive health as we do to women's," Turner told HuffPost. "And my bill does that."...

The use of caricatures and allusions to make political statements has been around at least since Martin Luther used wood carvings to contrast Jesus driving the money-changers from the temple with the pope writing indulgences while parishioners paid money in tribute...

On Dec. 17, 1862, as the Civil War entered its second winter, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued the most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.” Known as General Orders No. 11, the document blamed Jews for the widespread smuggling and cotton speculation that affected the area under Grant’s command...