A debit of gratitude to Bank of America Its planned $5 fee for using a debit card has driven out into the open other fees that were long hidden to consumers. BofA has 57 million consumer and small-business accounts. If a majority… (Mario Tama, Getty Images ) This may be a very unpopular thing to say…

The Misconception : You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth : You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm. Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters. Born in 1706 as the eighth of 17 children to a Massachusetts…

Catherine Keener and John Cusack in Being John Malkovich by Charlie Kaufman Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection M y first writing job was on a TV show called Get a Life. The show was mostly in the voice of its creators, Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick,…

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in. Credit Illustration by Barry Blitt I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to…

If Brian Harrison and W. G. Stover, the two Solyndra executives who took the Fifth Amendment at a Congressional hearing on Friday, ever spend a day in jail, I’ll stand on my head in Times Square. It’s not going to happen, for one simple reason: neither they, nor anyone else connected with Solyndra,…

So we’re having an economic crisis. I say “having,” not “had,” because we have by no means recovered. Financial panic may have subsided, stocks may be up, but employment remains far below pre-crisis levels, and unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains disastrously high. And while…

But in the case of Lucas the changes to the original have been so awful, and the memories he's tinkering with are held so dear, that it seems a kind of spite is driving him at this point. I'm not going to list the details of all the alterations here ( that's what Google's for ), but suffice it to…

OMG! The great Ben Hecht's original James Bond script has been discovered. http://bit.ly/j3yeBC

The Big-Shake, Big-Wave Theory See how a megaquake would shake out in the Pacific Northwest Oregon Sea Grant geographer Corcoran Oregon Sea Grant geographer Corcoran Seaside, Oregon Seaside, Oregon PITY POOR CASSANDRA, blessed by Apollo with the power of prophecy, cursed with the fate of ­disbelief.…

Farm-fresh organic lighting In principle, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are similar to LEDs, except for the fact that the semi-conductors used are organic. In practice, OLEDs are a very different beast, being an "area source" compared to the LED "point source." That is, OLEDs are light…

Strike! At least seven major cities adopted measured service in the 1880s: Boston; San Francisco; Buffalo; Pittsburgh; Indianapolis; Washington, DC; and Rochester, New York. The policy had a pro-consumer aspect; it expanded the market of any local exchange carrier to people who didn't want to pay a…

Suppose instead Eastwood had been an active opponent of the civil rights of any minority other than people with disabilities. Suppose he’d been sued for race or gender discrimination at his resort instead of disability discrimination. And then suppose he’d made a movie manipulating the audience to…

By the time I arrived in Hamburg the fate of the financial universe seemed to turn on which way the German people jumped. Moody’s was set to downgrade the Portuguese government’s debt to junk-bond status, and Standard & Poor’s had hinted darkly that Italy might be next. Ireland was about to be…

Five years ago, if you were an investor looking for guidance on which country’s debt was the safest to invest in, Standard & Poor’s ratings wouldn’t have done much to help you navigate the headwinds of the financial crisis. Investors now think that Ireland has more than a 40 percent chance of a…

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is an oncologist and former White House adviser who will be a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania beginning in September. He will be contributing regularly to Op-Ed. RIGHT now cancer care is being rationed in the United States. Probably…

Technology used in new enhanced driver's licences being adopted by B.C., Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec is ill-suited for use in identification and poses significant privacy and security risks, says a spokeswoman for the high-tech card industry. What is RFID? Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID,…

Adam Knight has a smart take on why Netflix is unbundling its DVD service from its streaming service: The Internet’s memory is short so let’s go back a week ago to when Netflix lost the Sony movies and almost lost Starz. Why did that happen? Netflix WI subscribers passed a certain number specified…

Stanley Kubrick always referred to the story as " Pinocchio ." It mirrored the tale of a puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. And what, after all, is an android but a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings? The project that eventually became Steven Spielberg's "A. I. Artificial…

Once Greece goes… John Lanchester The economic crisis in Greece is the most important thing to have happened in Europe since the Balkan wars. That isn’t because Greece is economically central to the European order: at barely 3 per cent of Eurozone GDP, the Greek economy could vanish without trace…

Rob Bennett H&H Bagels at 80th Street and Broadway in New York City Follow @TIME H&H Bagels, New York City's most popular bagel shop, shuttered its doors this week , causing a predicable spate of meditations on the iconic bread. There are few foods that are truly unique to New York, and the bagel is…

Paolo Pellegrin/ Magnum Photos , for The New York Times ON A MONDAY evening in September, James Schamus and a dozen students in his graduate seminar in film theory at Columbia University were discussing the dialogues of Plato. Each participant who spoke called on the next speaker, and Schamus gave…

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “ Baka malamig doon ” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend,…