It's only natural, I suppose, for a $625 five-volume, epochal publishing event like Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to polarize the food world. After all, this is the book the whole culinary world has been waiting for: "the cookbook to end all cookbooks," as David Chang called it. I witnessed Myhrvold's impatience with old-fashioned ways of thinking when I visited the eccentric millionaire last fall, and so last week's dustup with superstar food writer Michael Ruhlman wasn't unexpected. ...

One billion people will die from tobacco-related causes by the end of the century if current consumption trends continue, according to a global report released Thursday by the World Health Organization . At a press conference held in midtown Manhattan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, contributed $2 million to conduct the study, joined top WHO officials to present the findings. Among the litany of sobering statistics: 5.4 million people die each ...

Planet hunting is by far the hottest area of astronomy these days, and just about everyone who's in on the search is looking for the same thing: a distant world where life could exist, at least in theory. That means a world more or less the size of Earth, orbiting its parent star in the habitable zone — the location, just the right distance away from its sun's heat, where water can exist in liquid form. Size ...

The good news is that the American economy is back to its precrisis size. The U.S. GDP is now about $13.5 trillion, a bit above what it was in 2007, before the financial crisis. The bad news is that we are producing the same amount of goods and services as in 2007 with 7 million fewer workers. The number of Americans who are unemployed has roughly doubled, and though that number is declining, it is doing so ...

The greatest battle of World War II may still be fought on English soil. If it is, one of many reasons that Hitler may be beaten will be the new and growing British People's Army opposing him: Brit ain's Home Guard. And one of the many obscure heroes responsible for Hitler's defeat will be the most urgent of Britain's advocates for a People's Army: Thomas H. Wintringham. Tom Wintringham is no Sandhurst diehard, but his dope on warfare is from ...

When President Barack Obama flew to Cairo two years ago to deliver a speech designed to start an American conversation with the Muslim world, it seemed an almost revolutionary act — and the enthusiasm of his reception was in sharp contrast with the Arab world's widespread hostility towards President George W. Bush. But as Egypt makes revolutionary changes of its own, the prevailing sentiment remains that Obama has been a bitter disappointment. "We were all so hopeful," says Islam Bakr, 52, a security ...

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such violence, its growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the case.

After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation. Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that ...

YOU MAY ALREADY BE A COLLECTOR Among the distinctions that painters covet--gallery shows, a high price for their work at auction, placement in a museum, a patron--being cited by the Guinness Book of World Records is not a must-have. But JANE WOOSTER SCOTT received that honor recently when she was named the "Most Reproduced Artist in America." "I heard I was closing in on the title; for a while I was running neck and neck with Picasso," says Wooster Scott, ...

The great recession hasn't been great for free trade. As unemployment has risen throughout the world, governments have become more focused on protecting their own industries than on promoting international commerce. The U.S., typically an enthusiastic supporter of open markets, included "buy American" clauses in its stimulus package and propped up its flailing auto industry with handouts. Although a meeting of ministers in New Delhi in early September promised to restart long-stalled World Trade Organization negotiations aimed ...