The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history...

What the heck has Obama done so far?

The year 1968 was one of heartbreak and division, marked by assassinations, war, and war protests. Campuses were riven with contending passions. But at two schools there were oases of agreement, uniting students, faculty, and alumni. Harvard and Yale had stellar unbeaten football teams. Yale’s was the more glamorous, with quarterback Brian Dowling, who had not lost a game since the seventh grade. His team-mates called him “God,” and soon the whole campus was doing it. The team’s black running back, Calvin Hill, was hardly less celebrated—he would go on to a famous professional career...

There are various legends and half-truths surrounding the “real’’ identities of many of the bedrock “Doonesbury’’ characters..

Lawmakers aligned with the tea party are moving quickly to show their strength by trying to ban budget earmarking in the Senate, where support is still strong for the practice critics deride as pork-barrel spending...

Among the many firsts in the 2010 elections, it is safe to assume that the following words had never before been uttered about a future member of Congress, “This is a candidate who is probably best known for getting drunk and having sex on television.”...

After weeks of ominous debate about a global "currency war," the leaders of the world's largest economies will gather this Thursday and Friday for a G20 meeting in South Korea. The Obama administration will put a brave face on its failure to shame China into revaluing its currency, a concession that would help to tame the country's destabilizing trade surplus. But the lack of concessions from China may prove even more serious than the currency warriors realize, because a quiet revolution is stirring deep inside the country's manufacturing machine. China is advancing so rapidly in terms of productivity that a compromise on currency might serve only to slow its rise as an export juggernaut...

Fifteenth- and 16th-century European explorers helped to transform cartography during the Age of Discovery. Rather than mapping newly discovered worlds, Blaise Agüera y Arcas is out to invent new ways of viewing the old ones.

Mr. Agüera y Arcas is the architect of Bing Maps, the online mapping service that is part of Microsoft Corp.'s Bing Internet search engine. Bing Maps does all the basics, like turn-by-turn directions and satellite views that offer a peek into the neighbor's backyard, but Mr. Agüera y Arcas has attracted attention in the tech world by pushing the service to do a lot more...

Garry Trudeau ’70 ART ’73 has broken one too many barriers. For starters, he has written his own obituary...

Just four years after surrendering power, Republicans recaptured control of the House and made gains in the Senate on Tuesday night, in a major rebuff of President Obama and the Democrats by an electorate worried about the economy and the size of the government...