There are two classes of people in the world, observed Robert Benchley, "those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not." Half of those who divide quote Benchley and his fellow aphorists. The other half prefer proverbs. And why not? The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the ...

To some, the very idea of optimism seems peculiarly American. In fact, the concept was German, the word was French, and the trait precedes nations altogether: it is baked into our DNA. I'd argue--as Tali Sharot does in her enlightening cover story and her book from which it was adapted--that optimism is an evolutionary trait, that it helped our ancestors strive and survive. Optimism is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy: it allows us to attempt things we might not otherwise ...

Fireworks lit up the skies of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a on Tuesday night as Yemeni government officials claimed that President Ali Abdullah Saleh, recovering from wounds he sustained in an attack on his palace earlier this month, would be returning to the Yemeni capital on Friday, June 24. The president's supporters made a raucous display of their joy by shooting barrages of AK-47 rounds into the air, similar to their display of support when news of ...

But on Sept. 5, 1972 at the Munich Olympics, history would not wait. It hastened to crib from one of Sieber's scenarios virtually horror for horror. The psychologist had submitted to organizers Situation 21, which comprised the following particulars: At 5:00 one morning, a dozen armed Palestinians would scale the perimeter fence of the Village. They would invade the building that housed the Israeli delegation, kill a hostage or two , then demand the release of prisoners ...

"I have never been much taller than my cello," Pablo Casals once remarked. He spoke more modestly than he knew. For in the history of music, Casal's cello stands very tall indeed. Most musicians would agree that he was the greatest cellist ever to play that awkward instrument. More than that, he was a humanist who refused to compromise or adjust in an age of compromise and adjustment. "We are before anything men," he said, "and we have to take ...

At least four performers were injured doing the technically demanding stunts. Opening night had to be delayed repeatedly as the show was being worked on. The critics slammed the show even before it was finished. Finally, most ignominiously, director Julie Taymor was ousted in March, as a new creative team was brought in to make major revisions in the Broadway musical that had become a late-night TV punch line. When Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark finally opened ...

Julie Cherie Rodriguez died in her sleep last week at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver. Only 2 years old, Julie made surgical history by living for a record 13 months after a liver transplant, the most difficult organ transfer yet attempted. Death resulted from a recurrence of the cancer that first made the transplant necessary. The postmortem showed the new liver, despite some cancerous invasion, worked well to the last.

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 ...

Even the most iconic moments in American history can start to seem a little shopworn after a while. The flag-raising at Iwo Jima? Seen the picture a million times. FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech? Isn't that a bumper sticker? The same overfamiliarity is true, to a lesser extent, of President Kennedy's historic speech before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961 in which he set the U.S. on the path to a lunar ...

I don't watch Saturday Night Live. I don't own a television, and I do own a 10-month-old baby, so you do the math. But that didn't stop me from being riveted, absolutely riveted, by an oral history of the show called Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, by James Miller and Tom Shales, published in 2002. Until then I didn't realize that Chris Farley pooping out a 17th story window of Rockefeller ...