Conjure a combat photographer in your mind's eye -- fatigues, a whiskey flask and a fondness for rude pastimes. Now discard the cliche and conjure Chris Hondros of Getty Images insted. A tweed blazer with elbow patches. A taste for martinis. A love of Mahler. And a passion for chess...

Never mind the spin, what do we know for sure about the controversial process of fracking?...

When 1,900 invited guests take their coveted places in Westminster Abbey next week for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, one of the most uneasy seats in the 13th-century Gothic church may be the one occupied by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, the longtime lover of Prince Charles, and since her marriage to the heir to the throne in 2005, the stepmother to William, Charles’s older son...

It was noon in Washington, D.C., when the shooting began in Tucson. Across the country, reporters and media executives rushed to cover the story of the gunman, the Congresswoman he shot at close range, and the 14 other victims. But the news couldn’t reach one of the Internet’s most important writers. For Andrew Sullivan, M.P.A. ’86, Ph.D. ’90, the editor of a blog called TheDish.com, the weekend is a time for rest, and having teed up on Friday afternoon a half-dozen evergreen posts for Saturday, he had turned off his communication devices and was sleeping in...

On a warm summer afternoon in 2005, Bryant Austin was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific by the islands of Tonga, looking through his camera at a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. As he waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Turning around, Mr. Austin found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale...

Crowds surge, "martyrs" are carried from the protest field, and gunshots ring out through the night -- view videos from Syria's most recent protests as the country marches towards revolution...

The terrified look in one of her employee’s eyes was the first clue Terri Rodriguez had that something was terribly wrong Saturday afternoon...

n the Coin Laundry, a dryer is still loaded with clothes: an orange hooded sweatshirt, a green worker's vest and two pairs of jeans, damp and smelling of mildew. At Joe's Man restaurant near the train station, a menu lists the lunch specials, starting with bacon-and-eggplant pasta in a tomato-cream sauce. A flyer on the open doors of the Nishio clothes shop promotes a five-day "inventory clearance" sale. Over the road that runs through the town center, a white-and-blue sign proclaims: "Understanding Nuclear Power Correctly Will Lead to an Abundant Life." But life, by and large, is what is absent in this town, just a few miles away from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant...

In my more hopeful moments, I like to think that drunken frat brothers everywhere are quoting Beat poetry to each other. It would be a fine vindication of our educational system. And it seems to be the implication of the definition of shit-faced—which, along with the other shit compound words, lives in the OED between shish-kebab and shiv...

Virginia craftsman Byron Whitehurst designs the polystone busts of American presidents that line the shelves of a gift shop at the National Museum of American History. Priced at $20 each, the trinkets are a favorite among tourists, who buy about 1,200 a year. But that was before a visiting senator picked up one of Whitehurst’s busts and noticed a small tag proclaiming “Made in China.” His angry reaction touched off a firestorm that has forced the Smithsonian to clear its shelves of many souvenirs and rethink how it stocks its popular gift shops...