Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures...

...I would offer the perhaps heretical suggestion that political journalism, far from having gone into a terminal decline, is in better shape now than it was back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, which some hold up as a golden age. Back then, the American media world was a cozy oligopoly, and, like all oligopolies, it limited its output. On television, the three networks provided half an hour of evening news, much of it unrelated to politics, and, from 1980 onwards, one decent late-night news show: ABC Nightline. In print, the big metropolitan papers and the three newsweeklies dominated things, largely to the exclusion of other players...

A bomber on a motorcycle killed a scientist from Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site and his bodyguard-driver on Wednesday during the morning commute in Tehran, Iranian media reported, in an assassination that could further elevate international tensions over the Iranian nuclear program and stoke the country’s growing anti-Western belligerence...

The brilliant acrobatics of leaping lizards could inspire the creation of an army of nimble robots able to swarm through collapsed buildings or mines to find survivors, UC Berkeley researchers say.

By scrutinizing slow-motion video of a redheaded African lizard, the Berkeley team saw how the creature gyrated its tail to right itself after stumbling off a slippery surface. Despite the faltering start, it nailed a four-footed landing on a wall.

At least he's got that one vote.

Grandpa, a spider monkey known for his prognostic abilities, has picked Newt Gingrich to win today's hotly contested New Hampshire primary. While the primate's pick seems to go against all other predictions, polling and common sense, his record of picking US Open and Super Bowl winners might give the other candidates pause...

It’s a nation that permits the assassination of private citizens, a place where the military can arrest you at will. The unemployment rate is higher than officials let on. The economy is careening toward crisis. Violent street demonstrations are on the horizon. The government edges toward tyranny and dictatorship.

Welcome to Ron Paul’s America...

Our lives today are more defined by technology than ever before. Thanks to Skype and Google, we can video chat with our family from across the planet. We have robots to clean our floors and satellite TV that allows us to watch anything we want, whenever we want it. We can reheat food at the touch of a button. But without our basest instincts — our most violent and libidinous tendencies — none of this would be possible. Indeed, if Canadian tech journalist Peter Nowak is to be believed, the key drivers of 20th-century progress were bloodlust, gluttony and our desire to get laid...

Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released...

Forget his specific rivals. The biggest threat to Mitt Romney is hitting now and set to fully detonate in South Carolina: it’s the Bain bomb.

While conservatives look unlikely to unite around one alternative to Romney, the campaigns themselves are uniting around this one theme, that the former head of Bain looted companies, tossed people out of jobs and is now exaggerating his success at the venture capital firm...

Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds...