The FBI is looking into what millions of people are looking at : hacked photos of naked celebrities. Pictures from the formerly private collections of Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and others are being posted for the world to see. We now hear that compromising pix of Kim Kardashian are also circulating. Shocking beyond […]

Americans are in the dumps about their future. What does that have to do with legroom in economy class? Everything. The middle class sees its stature shrinking in the global pecking order and in a culture that favors money over well-being. There can be no better example for this than the indignities of flying economy. […]

When I first encountered Neil deGrasse Tyson, I thought, “What a nice man.” He was on the TV screens at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, where he’s director, urging us to behold the wonder of — to use the biblical term — the heavens. That impression only grew on seeing his television show, “Cosmos: A Spacetime […]

It matters not whether you are sizing up, sizing down or sizing sideways. Merchants have products to help you on your way to the life you think you want. Before L. Frank Baum published his first Wizard of Oz book in 1900, he helped create the modern consumer society by totally redesigning store windows in […]

The online rental booking service Airbnb is a fast-growing empire that pairs travelers with people wanting to profit off a room in their house — or the whole house. Like VRBO, HomeAway and similar platforms, Airbnb occupies the lodging sector of the “sharing economy.” I come not to address the legal concerns such services raise. […]

On television, summer reruns are becoming a thing of the past. Noting a jump in demand for fresh entertainment in the hot months, TV execs are responding with original programming. In Washington, however, suing Obamacare gets played over and over and over again, whatever the heat index. These summer reruns don’t get much audience, but […]

A jazz great died this month. Though revered by fans around the world, Horace Silver is not a household name in his own country, where the popular taste tends more toward rock and country than it does toward jazz. Silver’s most widely recognizable tune, “Song for My Father,” is recognizable mainly because the rock band […]

The boarding pass typically lists two times: the time of departure and the time of boarding. For many airline passengers, the only significant one is time of departure. That’s because “time of boarding” marks only the beginning of a long process of which they are at the end. The parade of passengers qualifying for priority […]

An aspiring rapper posts his lyrics on Facebook, suggesting a Halloween costume with his estranged wife’s “head on a stick.” He goes on: “I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts. Hurry up and die, bitch, so I can…” and so on […]

From the happy reports, you’d think that liberals had only to celebrate the tea party’s recent Mississippi defeat. True, Sen. Thad Cochran’s winning strategy — reaching out to Democrats, in particular African-Americans — made for an especially gratifying runoff victory. But there was something strange about blue-state progressives praising Cochran for his pork-collecting skills — […]