Our marriages often provoke us to throw the china and utter the unforgivables. The context is usually personal, not political, but either way, passions run high. In May, barring some unforeseen procedural hindrance, gay couples will wed for the first time ever in the U.S. They will have that opportunity by order of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to deny them marriage licenses. Gays and lesbians across the country celebrated. Hundreds of ...

The financial crisis in California grew worse this week as state controller John Chiang warned that if legislators and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger fail to come up with a budget-balancing package, he would begin paying California's bills with IOUs on July 2. The state has only done this once since the Great Depression. What has brought California to such a perilous state? How did its government become so wildly dysfunctional? One obvious cause is the deep recession, which has ...

Turkish democracy is alive and kicking. Yes, conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — under fire for his authoritarian leanings — won Sunday's elections with a landslide 50% of the vote, basking in the longest period of economic prosperity in the country's recent memory. But his Justice and Development Party fell short of a sought-after two thirds "supermajority" which would have allowed him to change the country's founding principles without seeking the opposition's consent. And, as a ...

The baffling history of mankind is full of obvious turning points and significant events: battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or deposed, and now, seemingly, planets conquered. Equally important are the great groundswells of popular movements that affect the minds and values of a generation or more, not all of which can be neatly tied to a time and place. Looking back upon the America of the '60s, future historians may well search for the meaning of one such movement. ...

The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time," predicted futurist and historian H.G. Wells in 1931. "When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine." Though this prophecy of nearly 70 years ago credited one woman with the power that actually came from a wide and deep movement of women, no one person deserves it more. Now ...

INTERNATIONAL "Who Rules the World?" Opens, most auspiciously, the political New Year 1928. Not since the World War has a twelvemonth commenced with all nations so substantially at peace, with all major governments so markedly stable. While this unusual global calm prevails, it becomes possible and prudent to scan certain key nations and their great men, asking and answering a crisp, significant question: "Who rules the World?" British Empire. The strong trend of the Dominions is toward increasingly autonomous minor-nationhood, ...

Once a year, as another December gives way to a chill January, Chief Justice John Roberts rereads a poem published in 1749 by the great writer, moralist and late-night conversationalist Samuel Johnson. Roberts began the ritual in the 1970s as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was one of many students taught to revere Johnson by the master biographer Walter Jackson Bate. It is an odd pairing, not least because Roberts comes off as upbeat as a roomful of Rotarians, ...

When the welfare officers came to take three-year-old Archie Roach from his tin-lined house in Framlingham in southeastern Australia, they told his mother they were escorting him to a picnic. His aunt tried to scare them off with a gun, but it wasn't loaded. Institutionalized in a Melbourne orphanage, young Archie was told his family had died in a fire. His minders tried to force his hair straight, breaking comb teeth in his frizzy curls. It was a vain attempt ...

How did you come up with the idea for It Gets Better? Last summer I was reading about teen suicides, speaking at colleges and thinking that what I should be doing is going to high schools. But I would never get permission, as a gay adult, to speak to gay kids. Then it occurred to me that in the YouTube era, I was waiting for permission I no longer needed. Are there more suicides and incidents of bullying now, or ...

The man jailed for trying to kill British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a hotel bombing in 1984 appeared in Parliament Tuesday with the daughter of one of his victims. Patrick Magee, a former Irish Republican Army activist, held a public discussion with Jo Berry, whose father died in the bombing in Brighton, southern England 25 years ago Monday. Magee told members of Parliament it is "always a challenge to share a platform with Jo. ... The challenge is, I'm ...