Soon after buying Brooks Brothers in late 2001, Claudio Del Vecchio took a trip to the warehouse that keeps the company's archives. When a business has been around since 1818, you wind up with a lot of history—especially when you're talking about the retailer that sold Abraham Lincoln the overcoat he wore to Ford's Theatre, F.D.R. the cape he donned at Yalta, Fred Astaire the neckties he used as belts and generations of men the suits they wore to their ...

On writing the book I've always been given to remembrance and remembering--more when I was younger even than when I was President. When I was a young man, I thought about my childhood all the time. It's a Southern thing; we're all obsessed with the past. I was very blessed that both my mother and I saved virtually everything from my childhood. I was always a pack rat. I never had writer's block once I started. But I did ...

Shocked but not surprised. That might be the best way to sum up India's reaction to the revelation this week that a black market organ transplant ring had been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes, and using them in foreigners desperate for transplants. Police who busted the ring last week say doctors paid as little as $1000 for the kidneys and then sold them for as much as $37,500. The racket, based ...

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus' followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that ...

A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one hides his behavior, while the other can't stop talking about it. Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict. For instance, within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 ...

The uproar in the medical community was immediate. In a reversal of standard practice that bewildered physicians and patients around the nation, an independent government panel this week abandoned its long-standing recommendation that healthy women over age 40 get a breast-cancer screen once every year or two years. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force began advising women instead to delay regular screening until age 50, and even then, to get tested only every other year. The American Cancer Society ...

The story of Sen. John Ensign's affair with a former staffer took a new twist Thursday with the revelation by Ensign that his parents gave the woman's family $96,000 as a gift. A statement released on Ensign's behalf by his lawyer, Paul Coggins, said a check totaling $96,000 from both of Ensign's parents was given to Cindy Hampton, her husband, Doug, and two of their children in April 2008. It described the money as two separate gifts to each family ...

"American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert confirmed publicly what he assumed everyone already knew: He is gay. "I don't think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear that I am gay," Lambert told Rolling Stone magazine. He said he is "proud of my sexuality" and never sought to hide it during the "Idol" competition. "I embrace it," he said. "It's just another part of me." Still, he stayed silent when, in March, a picture of him, dressed in drag ...

In the final years of his second term, it was not unusual to find George W. Bush's motorcade routes lined with protesters chanting their objections or spelling them out on handmade signs. On Monday, President Barack Obama traveled to one of the most economically imperiled parts of the country — Elkhart, Ind. — to find his route bordered by hundreds of waving supporters. It continues to be this way for Obama, despite a three-week run in the White House ...