Hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, Pakistan’s leaders were given an ultimatum by the Bush administration: Because the looming war in Afghanistan could not be won without Pakistan’s help, Islamabad would have to choose between continuing its alliance with the Taliban or joining forces with the United States.

Just shy of 10 years later, President Obama’s announcement Wednesday night that he is beginning the long-anticipated withdrawal from Afghanistan marks another step in the gradual reversal of that calculus...

Two broad ocean highways where countless sea creatures migrate, feed, mate and reproduce have been discovered running across the Pacific by scientists tuning in to thousands of radio signals...

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés' Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question...

It was a short comment on my recent essay in The Times, “The Ashtray.”

#82: Tom Van Vleck
Ocean City, NJ
March 11th, 2011
9:44pm

…I had email today from another middle school student asking about Noel Morris’s place in history as (a) creator of electronic mail.

Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days.

I called him...

Chinese legal authorities have released the dissident artist Ai Weiwei after detaining him for nearly three months on suspicion of tax evasion, likely ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s human rights record, according to a report on Wednesday night by Xinhua, the state news agency. Mr. Ai was reached on his cell phone shortly before 12:30 a.m. Thursday. "I’m released, I’m home, I’m fine," he said in English. "In legal terms, I’m — how do you say — on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I’m fine."...

Federal health officials on Tuesday released their final selection of nine graphic warning labels to cover the top half of cigarette packages beginning next year, in the first major change to those warnings in more than a quarter century, over the opposition of tobacco manufacturers...

Reading North Korea's comic book propaganda...

Exactly one year ago, I wrote of my fear that, in the current self-publishing boom, "slush fatigue" -- a form of existential nausea, once suffered only by a few entry-level staffers in the book business, brought on by overexposure to terrible manuscripts -- could infect the general public. How innocent those days seem now! As if slush weren't bad enough, readers looking for a good ebook must now also wade through the same maddening stuff that's been clogging up their email inboxes for decades: spam...

Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one that will push carbon emissions over the edge. The language of environmentalism is the language of scarcity and loss, a constantly repeated message that we cannot continue living the way we are, or else. Sometimes the sheer, relentless doomsaying is enough to make you want to take a long, air-conditioned drive in a nice SUV.

But while news of the Earth's impending doom can sometimes seem exaggerated, there's one environmental disaster that never gets the coverage it really deserves: the state of the oceans...