At a time when many Americansthink their government is inept, the 'Special Operators' get the job done. Just ask the President, who is doubling down on the Navy SEALs...

The United States has now endured what by some measures is the longest period of war in its history, with more than 6,300 American troops killed and 46,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ultimate costs estimated at $3 trillion. Both wars lasted far longer than predicted. The outcomes seem disappointing and uncertain.

So why is there already a new whiff of gunpowder in the air?...

he C.E.O., in his usual crisp manner, began the meeting without any small talk. “Let’s get to the business at hand,” he said. “We have to find ourselves a historian, and we have to do it A.S.A.P.”

“Maybe a historian could figure out how we got this silly name,” the vice-president for marketing said. “Freddie Mac!...

It was my high school physics class and I must have been 17, all gangly and goofy, with an embarrassingly ratty "trash stache" (though I recall thinking my black Springsteen concert T-shirt elevated me into the stratosphere of cool). We were doing an experiment designed to measure the wavelength of visible light. At the time I still didn't get math. It always seemed really, really hard. I was never sure why, or what, I was doing with the calculations. On that day something shifted. All of a sudden I understood why math and science needed to be hard...

Americans haven't put a successful CEO in office since 1928. If Romney is to end the drought, he'll want to avoid appearing to be the second coming of our worst president...

If in the year 2000 the U.S. president had told the American people that the government would soon begin using robot planes to track people, including U.S. citizens, all over the world, and would reserve to itself the right to kill them without trial, it is safe to say there would have been an enormous uproar. But that is exactly what is happening today, and nobody cares...

Drones — more formally armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs — are “in.” Since a Predator strike in Yemen against Al Qaeda in November 2002 — the first known use of a drone attack outside a theater of war — the United States has made extensive use of drones. There were nearly four times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during the first two years of the Obama administration as there were during the entire Bush administration...

In a crucial step toward the ultimate approval of new oil drilling off the North Slope of Alaska, the Interior Department on Friday tentatively approved Shell’s plans for responding to a potential spill in the frigid Arctic waters...

“Eugene Hoskins is his name. He lives at Oxford, Miss., a University place of about three thousand people. He is well known about town for his eccentricities.” Thus begins the 1920 account of a 24-year-old black man whose constellation of neuropsychological symptoms—that is to say, his “eccentricities”—are now immediately recognizable as those of an autistic savant. Remarking on his “uncanny knowledge of dates,” the case report relates how “a bystander said to him: ‘I was married on the 8^th of June, 1901.’ Without a moment’s hesitation Eugene said: ‘Dat was a Satu’day.’ Given the month, day and year, he will give the day of the week. He never fails, never hesitates. Vary if you will by giving the year and month and asking what day of the month was the second Tuesday, or the fourth Friday—he answers just the same.”...