The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a California ban on selling or renting violent video games to minors. The ruling was an important win for free speech, as the court said that violent video games, not matter how objectionable, are works of art in their own right. But the ruling also raised an intriguing question: Why does the court treat violent images and sexual images so differently? The court's 7-2 decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association ...

One of the known methods of torture is sleep deprivation. It can make a person desperate. That is why parents of small children, as soon as all the common-sense strategies backfire and a woozy reality sets in, start combing bookshelves for a sleep guru. Someone who will please explain, preferably in three easy-to-follow steps, how to get their baby to sleep. I know this because I'm one of them. My program, developed by a woman my husband and I call ...

It was the final act in what Britain's Daily Mail newspaper called "one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience in modern times." Chafing under a court order that banned the press from naming a top player with an English soccer club who was alleged to have had an affair with a reality TV star, Britons took to Twitter. By May 21, details of the affair had been leaked so widely on the internet that over 50,000 ...

I used to tell my daughter stories about a family of mer-cats--kitties with fish tails--who lived in the East River and how they were persecuted by a mean purple octopus. I spent considerable time and effort coming up with nonviolent ways for the mer-cats to defeat the octopus at the end of each story. Finally one night I asked my daughter Lily, who was 4 at the time, how she thought the mer-cats should handle the problem. She chirpily replied ...

Sunday night, on the eve of the fifth 9/11 anniversary, docudrama was dynamite in North America. As millions in the U.S. watched the Clinton Administration botch snuffing out al-Qaeda on the first of ABC TV's two-part miniseries The Path to 9/11, hundreds of Canadians crowded into a Paramount multiplex theater to see the Toronto International Film Festival's world premiere of Death of a President, a sober fakeumentary from Britain's Channel 4 that imagines the assassination of the ...

The law requires that Americans elect someone President next year, but it's become impossible to predict if either side can collect the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win. Both President Obama and the growing posse of aspiring Republican candidates appear weak and unfocused, more stumblebums than thoroughbreds. It has gotten so bad that the honking threats by a tornado-haired reality-television star to run for President now command central attention in the race. All this with the New Hampshire primary looming only 10 months ...

THEOLOGY Toward a Hidden God Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no. Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the ...

After Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet, thousands of astounded people wrote to him. "I thank God," wrote a 68-year-old lesbian, "I have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race." Sputtered another writer: "Maybe, just maybe, some of the more hostile in the district may take some potshots at you--we hope!!!" There was a time when it ...

Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet. In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs ...

On a normal day, residents of Bin Jawad say, there is nothing remarkable about their sunny seaside town. Spread over desert hills sloping toward an azure Mediterranean Sea, Bin Jawad has a mostly apolitical Bedouin population. "It's a quiet town," says Salah, an engineer who lives in the town, which is barely a mile long from east to west. "Most of the people work in the oil companies nearby." But for the second time in ...