Hay oficios que se dedican a celebrar las fiestas decembrinas como si ninguna otra época del año pudiera ser tan entretenida. El cuetero, por ejemplo, a quien las leyes le tienen sin cuidado, en estas fechas vive de vender pólvora para iluminar el cielo y de lastimar con sus sonidos los oídos...

On a quick break between classes last week, Reef Al-Shabnan slipped into an empty room at Catholic University to start her daily prayers to Allah. In one corner was a life-size painting of Jesus carrying the cross. In another, the portrait of a late priest and theologian looked on. And high above...

Todo empieza con una mujer, Bettina Brentano Von Arnim -la romántica, escritora (“Mi alma es una bailarina apasionada; danza para una música secreta que sólo yo puedo escuchar”), compositora, editora, artista y activista social, amiga de Goethe y de Marx, de Beethoven y Franz Liszt, adorada...

Over the last year, Save the Children emerged as a leader in the push to tax sweetened soft drinks as a way to combat childhood obesity. The nonprofit group supported soda tax campaigns in Mississippi, New Mexico, Washington State, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia. At the same time, executives...

Drawn by a building boom unmatched in the world in recent decades, U.S. and European architects are flocking to China, turning Chinese leaders’ bold visions into concrete and steel realities and giving Chinese cityscapes a distinctly foreign signature. At a time when many Western economies are...

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed...

Where is my mind? The question — memorably posed by rock band the Pixies in their 1988 song — is one that, perhaps surprisingly, divides many of us working in the areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Look at the science columns of your daily newspapers and you could be forgiven...

If not a transfer of power, the whole show seemed at least a temporary handoff. An embattled president, fresh off an electoral shellacking and struggling to sell a controversial tax deal to members of his own party, turned to a former president who, exactly 16 years ago, was struggling to right his...

This decaying port city, near the heart of Yemen’s deadly Qaeda insurgency, may seem an odd place to host an international soccer tournament. Yet there they were, tens of thousands of fans from across the Arab world, packed into a vast stadium on Sunday night to watch the final game of the Gulf Cup....

In January 1973, William Ruckelhaus, the administrator of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, traveled to Los Angeles to break the bad news to residents: They were going to have to drive less. Automobile smog was choking the city, in stark violation of the Clean Air Act, and the EPA...