People love guys who write constitutions. Their genius is celebrated by historians, their intentions debated by judges, their names attached to poorly performing middle schools. I figured I would never know that glory. Because no matter how good my columns may be, they will never cause people to stop drinking and then start drinking again shortly afterward, except for me while I write them. And not always. But after the financial crash in Iceland, the new Prime Minister decided to ...

In the basement of a Cape Cod on a suburban street in northern New Jersey, a teenage boy turns to a friend and asks impatiently, "What did you get? I'll give you some of this"--indicating a bottle of Ritalin stuffed into the front pocket of his backpack--"for some of that painkiller." As a rap song plays just loud enough not to disturb the neighbors, his friend eyes the bottle suspiciously. "Is this generic, or is it the good stuff?" he ...

In New York County Surrogate's Court, the last will and testament of Marilyn Monroe was filed for probate, showing that for all her troubled personal life, her business affairs seemed in extraordinarily good order. Unencumbered by the debts, tax claims and pending lawsuits so common to Hollywood's money minters, the value of her estate was listed "in excess of $500,000," a legalism often meaning much more. She left $100,000 in trust for her mentally ill mother, $50,000 to her onetime ...

The big reveal has been revealed: Pottermore is ... an interactive thingy. A website, with assorted digital services. Harry Potter fans can enter and be sorted by the Hat and wanded by Ollivander. We can look at new images from the books As for the rest of it ... I'll admit it, it makes me a little melancholy, just as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter made me melancholy. There are two things that separate ...

Two new books examine the mystery of the Teamster's fate Who killed Jimmy Hoffa? And why, where and how? The main outlines of Hoffa's death were widely reported after he disappeared in 1975, but two writers provide some new details about the nation's largest and most crime-ridden major union in their forthcoming books: The Teamsters by Steven Brill, and The Hoffa Wars by Dan E. Moldea. The beginning of the end for Hoffa came in 1971, when President Nixon commuted ...

Google makes one of the world's leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It's even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn't synonymous with many things. It's synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all. At a press conference in San ...

For the iPod generation, it doesn't get more radical than wearing a veil. The hijab worn by traditional Muslim women might have people talking, but it's the wimple that really turns heads. And in the U.S. today, the nuns most likely to wear that headdress are the ones young enough to have a playlist. Over the past five years, Roman Catholic communities around the country have experienced a curious phenomenon: more women, most in their 20s and 30s, are trying ...

In a barebones basement office in Buffalo, New York, Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her miniscule staff of the education reform advocacy group, Buffalo ReformED, are against incredible odds. In less than a week they are trying to get a controversial law through the New York State Legislature that is known as the Parent Trigger. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents at any persistently failing school ...

It was evening rush hour in New York City. 42nd St. was packed, and I was hoping I would make the bus. His voice came out of the crowd. "Take that rag off!" Huh? In my four months of working in New York, that was a first. Actually, that was a first in the seven years since I started wearing a hijab. A lot of people turned to look at me as he shouted those words. I don't know exactly what I was ...

To see the conflict and our part in it as a tragedy without villains, war crimes without criminals, lies without liars, espouses and promulgates a view of process, roles and motives that is not only grossly mistaken but which underwrites deceits that have served a succession of Presidents. —Daniel Ellsberg THE issues were momentous, the situation unprecedented. The most massive leak of secret documents in U.S. history had suddenly exposed the sensitive inner processes whereby the Johnson Administration ...