Review: ‘Waiting for "Superman"’ Stirs Schools Debate

In an episode of the 1950s TV show Superman, a school bus full of kids is threatened with disaster as it nearly topples over a cliff, when — whoosh — the Man of Steel flies in and pushes the bus to safety. That was the fantasy that Geoffrey Canada, the South Bronx–bred boy who became a Harvard-trained education entrepreneur, hoped for as a child

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Tree Believer: Terrence Malick’s Cinematic Vision

In August 1973, a quiet young courier took a print of Terrence Malick’s debut feature Badlands from Los Angeles to Manhattan for submission to the New York Film Festival. After the screening, festival chief Richard Roud said to the messenger, “Would you please tell Mr

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YOUTH: The Return of the Gang

Among the phenomena of the 1950s was the rise of the violent urban gangs with their freewheeling, sometimes lethal “rumbles” in protection of their “turf.” By the mid-'60s, gangs seemed to be on the wane, their vital energies either drawn into the protest movements of that era or sapped by the burgeoning drug culture.

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Nuclear Batteries

Nuclear-powered cars! airplanes! Fridges and freezers! In the heady days of the early 1950s — at the dawn of the civilian nuclear power age and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program — nuclear optimists imagined a world powered by tiny nuclear reactors. Today, in an era of climate change and energy insecurity, the nuclear industry is dusting off some of those old dreams.

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D.C.’s Metro Rail Crash and America’s Aging Transit System

Investigators are still sorting through the wreckage of Monday’s crash of two Metro rail cars in Washington, D.C., the deadliest in the system’s 33-year history, which killed nine people and injured scores of others. Federal officials said on Tuesday that the train that rear-ended another was an older model that lacked equipment that might have helped avert the collision and, according to the Washington Post, had been overdue for needed brake work

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