Outside of Academia, does anybody read Gertrude Stein anymore? Most of her major works are too strenuously experimental to be much fun. Better to remember her as the bohemian Buddha of Paris, where she and members of her family assembled the 20th century's most fearless collections of modern art. "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," a phenomenal new show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers highlights of those hugely influential and long-dispersed collections for ...

As a 19-year-old philosophy student in Paris, Jens Martin Skibsted had a watershed moment when the bicycle protest against cars he was riding in came to a sudden halt. The roadblock? A motorcycle demonstration. "I realized the absurdity of it," says the Danish entrepreneur, who turns 40 this year. "People are not going to change because an activist goes around shouting." So Skibsted took a different route. Instead of telling people they should get out of their cars, why not make ...

The giant Three Gorges Dam across China's Yangtze River has been mired in controversy ever since it was first proposed 88 years ago by Sun Yat Sen, the founding father of Modern China. In 1992, when Chinese Premier Li Peng submitted a proposal for the dam to China's normally pliant parliament, the National People's Congress, it ran into serious opposition and ultimately passed with the smallest margin in the legislature's history. Still, it is a sign of just how grave the problems are ...

In 1997, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City announced that Yoshio Taniguchi had won a 10-entrant competition against world-famous architects like Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas to design the museum's $425 million overhaul. Around the world, art lovers and architecture mavens alike responded with a loud, bemused, "Who?" So unknown was the 67-year-old architect outside his native Japan that one confused well-wisher congratulated Terence Riley, MOMA's chief curator of architecture and design, on selecting "Tony Gucci," ...

From the epochal to the mundane, the decisions of Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew have steered the history of his island nation for more than half a century. But as the political party Lee founded in 1954 seeks to shore up its sliding fortunes with a younger and more politically outspoken electorate, the 87-year-old man regarded as modern Singapore's founding father has withdrawn from day-to-day governance by quitting his Cabinet post along with Senior Minister Goh ...

When people write on Chinese websites that they "love the future," it should be a sentiment the government can get behind. After all, the authorities in Beijing have pressed their subjects to embrace the country's bright economic prospects. But of late, "love the future" has taken on a new meaning. Online, people have begun to use the phrase, which is ai wei lai in Mandarin, as a code for the artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, whose name became too ...

In Washington on Monday, Hillary Clinton unveiled the State Department's 10th annual report on modern-day slavery, which evaluates the efforts of every nation to combat the crime. For the first time, State ranked the antislavery efforts of the U.S. alongside those of 174 other countries. The U.S. rated itself as being in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act . But the report appears to have ignored a new congressional mandate to identify specific cases of ...

Formula One cars are a marvel of modern engineering, so much so, that many manufactuers who compete in the sport do so in order to benefit from the technical innovations race-honed research and development creates.

The forces assembled against print media scored a big scalp on Monday when Cond Nast announced that Gourmet magazine was finished. The 68-year-old foodie look book will close after the publication of its November issue, although the title will live on in books and on TV shows and some of its content will be folded into Epicurious.com. The closure was announced in a memo from Cond Nast CEO Chuck Townsend that brought other grim tidings: the company ...

For the small number of vulture lovers the world over, good news comes this summer from Sindh, Pakistan. In June, a new "vulture restaurant" opened to provide safe food for the endangered birds — no reservations needed, but it's always a fierce fight for the flesh. Similar vulture ventures have already been successful in South Africa, India and Nepal, where one region in which a restaurant started to provide vultures with clean carcasses saw a doubling of nesting pairs ...