There's a very thin line between being thrilled and being terrified, and Candice Feiring saw both emotions on her son's face. The sixth-grader had just gotten off the phone with a girl in his class who called to ask if he'd like to go to the movies--just the two of them. It sounded a whole lot like a date to him. "Don't I have something to do tomorrow?" he asked his mother. A psychologist and an editor of The Development ...

It is half an hour before showtime, and Oprah Winfrey is a lake of calm amid the gusts of activity around her. While a hairdresser and a makeup man are fussing over her, an Oprah Winfrey Show producer, Dianne Hudson, is giving her a ten-minute prep session for this morning's show. The subject is B.S. -- people who use it, people who hate it -- and the topic is giving the host some trouble. "I'm trying to relate to it," ...

They have arrived like a new immigrant wave in male America. They may be cops, judges, military officers, telephone linemen, cab drivers, pipefitters, editors, business executives—or mothers and housewives, but not quite the same subordinate creatures they were before. Across the broad range of American life, from suburban tract houses to state legislatures, from church pulpits to Army barracks, women's lives are profoundly changing, and with them, the traditional relationships between the sexes. Few women are unaffected, few are thinking ...

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine. Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that ...

The Get-Your-Man-to-Marry-You Plan: Buying the Cow in the Age of Free MilkBy Lori Uscher-PinesSt. Martin's Press; 196 pp. The Gist:Ladies, dying to get engaged, but your would-be groom is dragging his feet Look no further than this how-to guide to snagging your very own diamond. Culled from her own personal experience, Uscher-Pines, a PhD from Johns Hopkins, tackles the dos and don'ts of getting even the most reticent man down on one knee. There's no excuse he can give ...

Professor Michael Wesch should be flattered. A cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University, over the past few years he's received a hundred-plus requests from people around the world eager to enroll in the school's graduate program for "digital ethnography," a subject that he's known for. One problem: no such program exists. Wesch teaches anthropology to undergrads and heads up a working group on digital ethnography. The demand for his non-existent grad program is perhaps indicative, though, ...

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is denying accusations that a record fine levied against the country's largest media conglomerate, Dogan Holding, was politically motivated. "I believe it is not right to mistake the routine works of the state agencies with freedom of press," Erdogan said, according to Turkey's state news agency, Anatolian. The leader was speaking Monday at a dinner in the Turkish capital attended by European ambassadors. "I have no right or authority to exert political ...

Al Qaeda's second-in-command has accused President Obama of supporting a Palestinian state that would do the bidding of Israel. "Obama wants a Palestinian state that works as a branch for the Israeli government," Ayman al-Zawahiri said in a nearly 90-minute video called, "The Realities of Jihad and the Fallacies of Hypocrisy." The latest in a series of such videos was posted Monday on radical Islamist Web sites by al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab Media. "Israel is a crime that needs ...

The Bush years were a good time for relations between the world's two biggest democracies. After years of suspicion and tensions, India and the U.S. finally began to explore common ground, a shift that culminated in a breakthrough deal that opens the way for India to import civilian nuclear technology despite the facts that it refuses to sign the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty and it has twice tested nuclear weapons. The Obama Administration seems intent on keeping that atmosphere of ...

Google's netbook-friendly Chrome OS takes direct aim at Microsoft, whose eight-year-old Windows XP leads the netbook market. But the odds are stacked against Google. In competing with Windows, Google Chrome OS will have to deal with many of the same challenges Linux has: compatibility, usability, and unfamiliarity. The record isn't good: In the past year, Linux-based netbooks have rapidly lost market share to Microsoft, as people find that Linux doesn't work as expected, may not support the applications or peripherals ...