To some, the very idea of optimism seems peculiarly American. In fact, the concept was German, the word was French, and the trait precedes nations altogether: it is baked into our DNA. I'd argue--as Tali Sharot does in her enlightening cover story and her book from which it was adapted--that optimism is an evolutionary trait, that it helped our ancestors strive and survive. Optimism is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy: it allows us to attempt things we might not otherwise ...

Visiting Jerry Seinfeld's home in the Hollywood Hills, one finds that the benefits of being a top television performer are readily apparent: even the three Porsches in his smartly tiled garage--two vintage, one a 1997 Turbo S--have a view of all Los Angeles. This is thanks to a picture window cut into the garage's wall. Yes, it's nice to be a TV star's car, just as it's nice to be a TV star . And now that even Mikhail Gorbachev ...

When Marcia Rasmussen set out for a spring run on the trails of Sequoia National Park last week, it felt like just another season of backcountry training. But it hadn't been just another winter. All of a sudden, the snow underneath her trail collapsed and she fell into an icy creek that swept her downstream. Trapped in a snow tunnel for three hours, she almost died of hypothermia before she was rescued. "It's a very different situation ...

It was an awkward situation: There I was, stuck in a windowless conference room, talking sex with a Catholic priest. Not just any priest — an Archbishop, sitting under a portrait of the Pope. It was April 2008, and His Excellency Paciano Aniceto and I had met in Manila to discuss his position on contraception. As a member of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, Aniceto has been a prominent anticondom campaigner, denouncing all forms of "artificial" ...

Excerpts from the report of the Commission headed by Associate Justice Roberts which investigated and fixed the blame for the disaster at Pearl Harbor: >In a letter of January 24, 1941, the Secretary of the Navy advised the Secretary of War that the increased gravity of the Japanese situation had prompted a restudy of the problem of the security of the Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor. The writer stated: "If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible ...

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it. One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during ...

On April 20, Major League Baseball took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team whose overleveraged owner is going through a humiliating public divorce and steering the franchise towards bankruptcy. The Dodgers' financial situation had been so dire that last week Frank McCourt, who is fighting for ownership of the team with his estranged wife, Jamie, needed a $30 million loan from Fox, the team's television partner, to make payroll. That's right, the Dodgers, one of ...

The New Republic recently asked an intriguing question about the U.S. intervention in Libya: Why isn't Obama getting credit for preventing an atrocity? The answer is obvious when you think about it: because he prevented the atrocity. It's hard to get credit for avoiding a disaster when it's impossible to prove the disaster would have happened without you. Social scientists call this the counterfactual problem. There's no double-blind study to show what would happen in an alternative ...

Iceland is losing its only three McDonald's restaurants as a result of the poor economic situation in the country.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on Monday refused to appear at the opening day of his long-awaited trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.In a letter dated Wednesday and made public Thursday, Karadzic complains that he has not been given the relevant case material on time -- and he says the volume of material would have been too much to go through even if he had received it promptly. "I ask Your Excellencies -- why and how ...