guptaranjan/flickr Before she deprived people of food, Dr. Krista Varady deprived mice. Not for long, and not entirely, but during her post-doc research at the University of California Berkeley in 2006, Varady helped them learn what real hunger was. She wanted to know how short-term fasting affected…

i. “Your name is Tasbeeh. Don’t let them call you by anything else.” My mother speaks to me in Arabic; the command sounds more forceful in her mother tongue, a Libyan dialect that is all sharp edges and hard, guttural sounds. I am seven years old and it has never occurred to me to disobey my mother.…

Exhibition Review The Little Prince: A New York Story A drawing by Saint-Exupéry at the Morgan Library & Museum. Credit... Estate of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Morgan Library & Museum, New York If you are one of those people who, on looking up at the heavens, wonder whether a sheep on a particular…

My period was late. It was just part of female fluctuations. I know this not because I am meticulous or particularly in tune with my bodily cycles. I know it because my clever little period tracking application informed me. Period-tracking apps are exactly what they sound like — simple menstrual…

cordjefferson: I wrote about how we talk about black athletes. http://t.co/c6Qunubkr2

Will governments ever understand the limitations of national borders? Photograph: Herbie Springer/Alamy T his week, my film Faisal Goes West , the imaginary journey of a young man from Khartoum to a chicken farm in Texas, screened at the opening ceremony of the Sudan Independent Film Festival in…

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images The recent travails of Chris Christie have jumbled together two qualities of his style that are actually distinct. One is corruption of power, and the other is a willingness to work with both parties. In the wake of spreading abuse-of-power scandals, Christie used his…

Photo Credit Noel Hendrickson/Getty Images Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. A number of studies have shown that exercise can remodel the brain by prompting the creation of new brain cells and inducing other changes. Now it appears that inactivity, too, can remodel the brain,…

Reuters It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone's favorite, ROBOTS . Whatever name you prefer, some form of it has been stoking progress and killing jobs—from seamstresses to paralegals—for…

Let me start this out by saying I didn't "hack" something in the black hat Hackers way, but by finding a market inefficiency and leveraging it to my advantage. It must be the day trader in me. No harm was done to any computers or systems in the making of this post. TL;DR: I booked a flight through…

moorehn: First piece I’ve seen that addresses baffling financial cost of new journalism startups. $10m to earn $1.2m/yr? http://t.co/TQjh5513BP

jaketapper: some "in defense of richard sherman" posts: http://t.co/NKMzKeaGrX http://t.co/9QjTLPmS0e

The Carpetbagger This year’s Oscar ingenue is Ms. Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave.” She says it took encouragement to get over the feeling of being an outsider, a phenomenon she dubs “acute impostor syndrome.” Credit... Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Jordan Strauss/Invision/Ap LOS ANGELES — Lupita…

Members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a federal panel, at a workshop about surveillance held in a Washington hotel last summer. Credit... Christopher Gregory for The New York Times WASHINGTON — An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security…

The first recorded appearance of this breathless acronym for “Oh, my God!” comes, surprisingly, in a letter to Winston Churchill.

Both agencies said nine of the 10th warmest years on record have happened in the 21st century.

Nicole Oulson viewed a photo of her husband, Chad, and their daughter, Alexis, at a memorial service for him on Saturday. Credit... Daniel Wallace/Tampa Bay Times, via Associated Press WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. — There’s a sticker on the door of the Grove 16 Theater just outside Tampa: no weapons. Curtis…

This is a love story. And in many great love stories, some will be punished and some will be pardoned. In this tale of woe, though, the punishment was meted out on national television : Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey was scorned, in his hour of need, by the man whose embrace he had so fervently…

3ba: How Did Toast Become the Latest Artisanal Food Craze? http://t.co/nQSaOgZr4X (Because I read everything @klohrenz tells me to.)

Chanathan: Ace read about 12 Years, Fruitvale, etc, h/t @calinative | The good white folks of the Academy | Al Jazeera America http://t.co/jaQN4oV8ig

NYTFridge: Quick detour while we're discussing the resurgent 80s; @reformedbroker's Wolf of Wall Street review was wonderful. http://t.co/fTLNztEpZs

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images There’s a fair amount of Schadenfreude this week among the New Jersey press corps, as they wait for the other shoe to drop in Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal and wonder if it’s Michael Drewniak, Christie’s press secretary and his “id,” as one official calls…

President Obama said Friday, in his first major speech on electronic surveillance, that “the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security.” Obama placed restrictions on access to domestic phone records collected by the National Security Agency, but the…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell Sitting in traffic destroys the soul. In the Hobbesian logic of a jam, each car becomes every other car’s enemy, and life’s purposefulness turns on itself. Time dilates. The NPR headlines roll by, then roll by again. Inching your way toward the tauntingly…

Paying Till It Hurts Dr. Brett Coldiron removes suspected cancerous skin cells from a patient during Mohs surgery at The Skin Cancer Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Credit... Luke Sharrett for The New York Times CONWAY, Ark. — Kim Little had not thought much about the tiny white spot on the side of her…

Texas Monthly Eric Gutierrez at BiblioTech, a digital public library in San Antonio, which offers 18,000 titles. Credit... Eric Gay/Associated Press Residents called to jury duty at the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio are now able to check out one of 200 e-readers while they wait to be called…

Ernest Dickerson was having none of it. It was 1990 when the veteran film director—who first gained notoriety as Spike Lee’s groundbreaking cinematographer on such landmark films as She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do The Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992)—was set to finally direct his own big…

Mr. Onoda, after being persuaded that the war was over. Hiroo Onoda, an Imperial Japanese Army officer who remained at his jungle post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, refusing to believe that World War II was over, and returned to a hero’s welcome in the all but unrecognizable Japan of…

What’s your first memory from when you were a little girl of what you wanted to be when you grew up? At a pretty young age, I wanted to do something with my life that would help people. I’ve been that way for quite a while. I wanted to be a counselor or social worker. That’s one of the reasons I was…

harrisj: Uh oh RT @DafnaLinzer: Read @stevekornacki scoop on Christie, Sandy aid and Hoboken: http://t.co/jTLbsezqlJ

Footsteps Café de Flore, where Baldwin worked on his novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Credit... Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times One bright afternoon in Paris, on the terrace of the cafe Deux Magots, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, I found myself engaged in an increasingly animated conversation…

The establishment freaks out as another favorite son falls from grace. "There are definitely people jumping ship." Lucas Jackson / Reuters / Reuters In the immediate aftermath of their emphatic defeat in 2012, the monied mega-donors and professional operatives who run the GOP took solace in what…

Clyde Haberman recounts the time a member of Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations – “A president of something or other,” as he puts it – got up and said: “Every morning when I read you, I get sick to my stomach." Related Articles New York Times CEO to Haaretz: Twitter's a snack,…

Today, popular website Jezebel offered $10,000 to anyone who can provide them with unretouched photos from Lena Dunham's recent shoot for Vogue . Jezebel is shrouding this bounty in the guise of righteousness, offering a list of the women whose images have been previously retouched by Vogue — Cheryl…

Courtesy of reports in the Times and elsewhere, we already pretty much know what restrictions on the surveillance state President Obama is going to announce in a speech planned for Friday: very few. Far from taking the National Security Agency to task for the flagrant breaches of individual privacy…

Olustee Journal A monument to Confederate soldiers at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park. A push for a Union monument has been criticized. Credit... Sarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York Times OLUSTEE, Fla. — There is an old saying in this state of seesawing sensibilities: The farther north…

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The water was back on, but the anxiety had not shut off. “My mom’s a nurse, and she didn’t want us drinking it or giving it to the kids or our animals,” Shawna Moore said as she shopped at a bookstore with her daughters, 9 and 12. Joe Hermansdorfer, who captured 45 gallons of…

The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. “We do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies,” an N.S.A. official said. Credit... Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted…

MIAMI — An argument over texting at the movies ended in a cellphone user’s death on Monday afternoon when a retired police officer in the audience shot him at a theater near Tampa, Fla., the authorities said. Two couples were among patrons at a matinee of “Lone Survivor” at the Grove 16 movie…