"Dong Thap's House of Love Proves Popular Attraction," screams the headline. This isn't the front page of a bawdy magazine; it's an item on a Vietnamese news-agency website. The story relates to the house of Huynh Thuy Le, an ethnic Chinese man and the central character in French author Marguerite Duras' steamy, largely autobiographical novella, L'Amant , set in 1920s colonial Indochina. The book recounts 15-year-old Duras' illicit affair with Le, a bachelor 12 years her senior. Both Duras ...

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building. The path of just such a discovery ...

Easy tip number one, if you want to talk like a pirate: Add "me hearties" to the end of any sentence. The meaning is simple -- "my friends, my mates" -- said John "Ol' Chumbucket" Baur, before offering as way of example, "Turn your head and cough, me hearties. Or, fill it up with regular, me hearties." Saturday marks "Talk Like a Pirate Day," an observance that has been recognized on all seven continents and beyond. It inspires dress and ...

Will Shortz is to puzzles what Oprah is to books — an endorsement by the New York Times crossword editor is as good as gold. He helped popularize Sudoku in the U.S. and has sold more than 5 million volumes of the number-sequencing game. Now he's moved on to another numerical brainteaser, KenKen, which boasts something Sudoku does not: actual math. The game was invented by a teacher in Tokyo to help kids learn arithmetic; kenken means "cleverness squared" in ...