Five months ago Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art crowned its notable 1936-3 7 season with a comprehensive exhibit of the very latest artistic wrinkle, Surrealism. With a vertiginous backward leap 200 centuries into the Fourth Ice Age, the Museum last week wound up its season by presenting an extraordinary collection of Prehistoric Rock Pictures. Director Alfred Barr Jr. saw no paradox. He recalled that many cave decorations were magic symbols to help the painter with his hunting, and thus "today ...

New research on the finicky eating habits of children with autism finds that while autistic children tend to eat a less varied diet than other kids do, their dietary preferences have little negative effect on their height, weight and growth. Researchers at the University of Bristol began with a database of children born from 1991 to 1992 who were enrolled in a long-term study in Avon, England. The children's caregivers completed detailed food questionnaires describing the kids' eating ...

Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that. One of the first things you notice is that people treat you differently when they know you have it. The hushed tone in which they inquire, "How are you?" is unnerving. If I had answered honestly during 90% of the nine months I spent in treatment, I would have said, "If ...

Ann Marie Hall sat next to her husband on the green sofa, trying to talk the gun out of his hands. "You know you can't kill yourself," she said. "Think about the boys, and your mother, and your brother and me. How will we feel?" Michael admitted he wasn't thinking straight. "It's not about anything but you and me," he said. Even as cops' marriages go, theirs was badly bruised. They had fallen in love fast; he proposed five months ...

Spring is coming, and a young man's thoughts turn to ... you know. Apparently, old men's thoughts turn to the same subject. According to an article to be published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, 67% of men ages 65 to 74 said they had been sexually active in the past year, compared with just 40% of women in that age group. Everyone knows young men think constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Die Welt. Olga Palavidou cautiously inserts a small spoon into the waxy cell of a honeycomb. The larva inside has to be moved to what's known as a "peanut" cell so that worker bees can raise it to become a queen bee. The job requires a lot of patience, and ...

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad used his third televised appearance in the three months since anti-regime protests first erupted to deliver a monotonous, rambling and technocratic speech to a handpicked audience at Damascus University on Monday — and while the autocratic leader promised a national dialogue, the offer is unlikely to damper the violent dissent rocking his country. There was little new in his more than hour-long address. In many ways, it was basically a repeat of his first speech before Parliament on March 30,

For a glimpse into the greatness of Tiger Woods, look past his runaway victory in the British Open at St. Andrews last month. Forget his triumph--also by a record margin--in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in June. And set aside his prospects for stomping the field in another major tournament, next week's PGA Championship at Valhalla. Consider, instead, what Woods did right after he dominated the 1997 Masters. He studied videotapes of his performance: blasting 300-yd. drives, hitting crisp ...

As doctors and researchers grapple with the U.S.'s runaway rates of obesity, they have begun to look for causes of it in a critical if little understood period of life: the nine months before birth. Research has found that women who gain too much weight in pregnancy have heavier babies — and that heavier babies are more prone to obesity later on. Until now, researchers had not been able to rule out the role of genes. If heavier ...

You could call it poetic justice. Back in 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then an up-and-coming young mayor of Istanbul with populist appeal and Islamist leanings, was sentenced to 10 months in jail for reciting a century-old poem that the country's generals — the enforcers of Turkey's constitutionally mandated secularism — found offensive. "Minarets are our bayonets," the poem went, "the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks, and the believers our army." Erdogan was packed away for inciting religious hatred, ...