Little kids still ring ryan Boatright's doorbell, wondering if the future University of Southern California point guard can come outside to play. During a recent family dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, as dessert crept dangerously close to the start of a movie at the mall, panic swept over Ryan's face. He looked as if he'd rather do a month's worth of dishes than spend another second of Saturday night with his family. In other words, Ryan Boatright is 14 years old. ...

If you really want to go green, the conventional thinking goes, buy a hybrid. Practically speaking though, there is a faster and cheaper option: shift to a low-carbon diet. The meal plan of the average American family accounts for 2.8 tons of CO2 emitted annually, compared with 2.2 tons for driving. Worldwide agriculture contributes some 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, far more than transportation. So when it comes to cutting your carbon footprint today, the truth is that what you ...

Osama bin Laden once crowed to an interviewer, "Believe me, when your children and your wife become part of your struggle, life becomes very enjoyable." The late Al-Qaeda chief uttered those words before 9/11, when he was able to keep his four wives and many children living comfortably in separate houses across Afghanistan. Every few weeks or so, Bin Laden would drop in on a wife to fulfill his husbandly duties. But at the end, his rosy portrayal ...

At the global headquarters of eHarmony in Pasadena, Calif., one blue wall is papered with testimonies of love: snapshots of couples who met on the Internet matchmaking site and subsequently got hitched. There are older couples, military couples, kissing couples, couples with physical disabilities, couples dressed in wedding whites. Soon, if all goes as planned, there will be Chinese couples, Indian couples, European couples, many dressed in the brilliant matrimonial hues of their cultures. They're going to need a new ...

When Sabreena Boyd was 11, she stood before the congregation at the New Jerusalem Full Gospel Church in Muscatine, Iowa, and asked for a new family. A member of the church's Sunday school, she had recently been placed in a foster home after her mother could no longer care for her. "I gave a speech saying that I wanted to be adopted by a Christian family, a loving family," recalls SaBreena, now 20. Stuart and Tina Juarez, a recently married ...

The strategies of religious and political extremists like James Dobson of Focus on the Family have become more nuanced of late. They have adjusted their language so that it is less vitriolic. They now utilize terms and approaches that often have a scientific-sounding overlay and are designed to appear more reasonable than those of their earlier efforts. They use the language of "concern" instead of the language of direct condemnation. They have had to make these adjustments ...

There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright adulation, on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has ...

PERSUADER Some call it the United Nations in Trastevere. When Andrea Riccardi founded the Community of Sant'Egidio with a circle of high school friends in Rome in 1968, he did not have big plans. The group would pray together and aid the poor and in that way help improve the human condition at least a tiny bit. "The periphery of Rome was like a Third World city," Riccardi recalls. Forty years later, Riccardi, 58, has made his presence felt a ...

THE ATTACKS of Sept. 11, 2001, sent religious people all over the world to their knees in prayer. Just 48 hours after the World Trade Center collapsed, a former altar boy from a poor Catholic family in Iowa found himself praying in private with Pope John Paul II. James Nicholson — tapped by President George W. Bush as the new Administration's ambassador to the Vatican — went ahead with a prescheduled Sept. 13, 2001, audience with the Pope to present ...

Anglophilia, like pornography, is one of those things that are hard to describe but you know when you see them. With the marriage of the vague, amorphous Prince William and the seemingly unemployable Kate Middleton, Anglophilia is on full display all over the world, particularly in the U.S. As two diabolically bland human beings plight their troth, or whatever one does with a troth, Anglophiles from Chappaqua, N.Y., to Redondo Beach, Calif., have a thrilling opportunity to drop to their knees, moisten their tongues, ...