Every new parent knows how difficult it can be to get a fussy baby to sleep, but new research suggests that a parent's best efforts may only be exacerbating the problem — and that inadequate sleep in childhood can have long-lasting health effects. "It is very hard to let your child cry it out when they are toddlers," says Dr. Elsie Taveras of Harvard Medical School, referring to parents' tendency to pick up their children or bring ...

Re "Why they leave France" [April 16]: There is a typically French disease that prompts citizens to overcriticize the country. Those judgments are, most of the time, merciless and exaggerated. I've traveled a lot, and I can tell you that people in the rest of the world are able to be supportive of their own country without being stupidly patriotic. You can certainly find thousands of faults with France, but there are still a million reasons to stay here, one ...

"I'm very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing," the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. "This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration," she ...

Celebrated Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan was awarded Best Director in Cannes on Sunday. Perhaps now Turks will finally go see his movies. Despite being heralded globally for his movie magic, Ceylan's films — slow-paced, poetic tales of individuals struggling against the bleak backdrop of modern Turkey — routinely flop back home. Distant, a previous Cannes competitor, was seen by just 20,000 people in Turkey — only one-fourth as many as saw it in France. His current ...

The best mayors in U.S. history have been great characters—showmen and radicals and bullies and rebels. Then again, so have the worst. Fiorello LaGuardia, who ruled New York from 1934 to '45, besides reforming and rebuilding his city, was famous for smashing slot machines with a sledgehammer and reading the comics to children over the radio during a newspaper strike. On the other hand, Chicago's William Thompson, first elected in 1915, kept a picture of his good buddy Al Capone ...

The coyote tilts his head back, bellowing out a series of high-pitched yips while standing alone in the patch of marsh he calls home. Soon a dog nearby barks in response. The coyote answers. Before long other dogs in the area add to the canine symphony, their woofs and yips resounding as the sun hangs low over shingled roofs just before dusk on Saturday. Every time a coyote makes a cameo, Donna Alexander's phone rings. Alexander, the administrator of Cook County Animal and Rabies ...

There have been a lot of weird things for sale on Craigslist over the years. But a $3,000 dinner reservation? Admittedly, the rezzie is actually a Wonka-style golden ticket that includes the cost of the meal itself, and the restaurant, Grant Achatz's Next in Chicago, is one of the most anticipated in many years. But still. Though no one has taken the seller up on his or her audacious offer, the mere fact of its existence has ...

"My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy," says Elyn Saks, the author of The Center Cannot Hold . It's hard to argue with that. While Saks has soared to the top of academia — a graduate degree from Oxford, a law degree from Yale, and a tenured professorship at the University of Southern California — she has also been shackled and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. Saks, 52, has schizophrenia, a ...

Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2003, a Phoenix housewife named Stephenie Meyer had a dream: a young woman was talking to a beautiful, sparkling man in a sunlit meadow. The man was a vampire. They were in love, and he was telling the girl how hard it was for him to keep from killing her. Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes. ...

Lars and Jens Rasmussen were broke and jobless -- with only $16 between them -- when they made it big in the Web world by selling their idea for Google Maps.