What a mensch was Peter Falk. An average-Joe hero, he embodied the best of us on our worst day. He was best known as TV's Lieut. Columbo, who, for 30 years, taught snooty murderers that, however crafty they thought they were, he was smarter. Every episode in the series was a class struggle, which reached its peak in the mid-1970's, played as a comedy of manners and won by the wily proletarian. But Falk, who died last ...

What makes us the way we are? Why are some people predisposed to be anxious, overweight or asthmatic? How is it that some of us are prone to heart attacks, diabetes or high blood pressure? There's a list of conventional answers to these questions. We are the way we are because it's in our genes: the DNA we inherited at conception. We turn out the way we do because of our childhood experiences: how we were treated and what we ...

When the news broke that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund , had been arrested for sexual assault and attempted rape in New York City, his wife Anne Sinclair wasted no time in declaring her unquestioned belief in his innocence. The heiress to an art-gallery fortune, Sinclair, also 62, is a celebrity in her own right, having been an award-winning radio-and-television journalist in France. She has stood by him in the recent ...

Since the Jan. 14 death of Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old in South Hadley, Mass., who committed suicide after being bullied by fellow students, many onlookers have meditated on whether the circumstances that led to her after-school hanging might have been avoided. Could teachers have stepped in and stopped the bullying? Could parents have done more to curtail bad behavior? Or could preventive measures have been started years ago, in early childhood, long before bullies emerged and started ...

Ana Idolo may be too young to order her own food, but the 2-year-old knows what she wants. As her father Marco unpacks the Happy Meal he ordered for her at a Barcelona McDonald's, she ignores the chicken nuggets and French fries, and instead holds out her hand in eager anticipation for the best part of the meal: a small plastic statue of the Star Wars character Yoda. "Sometimes I think we just buy these for the toys," says ...

The childhood friend of John Lennon's son who inspired the Beatles' psychedelic masterpiece "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has died aged 46 from the chronic disease Lupus. Lucy Vodden was a classmate of Julian Lennon, who came home from school one day carrying a drawing of his 4-year-old classmate. "That's Lucy in the sky with diamonds," he told his father. Lennon seized on the image in and embellished it in a song along with "newspaper taxis" and a "girl ...