The normal high school curriculum is a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where ...

Triple Olympic champion and world record holder Usain Bolt set a new meeting record in Lausanne with a stunning run over 200 meters of 19.59 seconds despite appalling weather conditions. In the pouring rain the Jamaican sprinter clocked just one hundredth of a second outside of the fastest time of the year set by American Tyson Gay, in his first and only European 200 meters apearance before next month's World Championships in Berlin. In typical style Bolt left ...