In American Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is the ‘sheepdog’ – someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack.
Entertainment Weekly
Many are decrying the film as merely conservative propaganda. But American Sniper – as with many of Eastwood’s films – has a more nuanced approach that addresses modern anxieties.
What’s the proper tip for a cup of joe?
Shutterstock
Aimed at allowing drones to operate in the national airspace safely alongside manned aircraft, they’re largely favorable to commercial operators who have been waiting years for workable regs.
A number of snow storms have led schools to declare snow days.
Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P./Flickr
Dave Marcotte, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A school year of less than 180 days is detrimental to kids’ learning. The most disadvantaged kids lose the most when schools have to declare snow days.
Health marketing materials used to promote measles vaccine during the 1960s.
CDC
Before the vaccine, we thought measles was a ‘mild’ illness. This is because vaccines drive down the number of people getting the disease while increasing our awareness of the risks.
They’re in agreement with Judge Hanen
Mike Blake/Reuters
The economy is creating the most jobs in 15 years, but only a substantial investment in our crumbling infrastructure and underpaid workforce will ensure they last.
Showing loyalty to the King in Amman
Muhammad Hamed/Reuters
Thousands of Jordanians - including the country’s Queen Rania - took to the streets of the capital Amman February 6. They were protesting the burning alive of the Jordanian fighter pilot Moaz al-Kasabeh…
Sometimes you don’t need a measuring stick to come up with an assessment: really, really deep.
katorisi
An iconic North American migration is in jeopardy. The monarch butterfly migrates back and forth from Mexico to Canada every year, its orange and black sails peppering blue skies. In the past 20 years…
Willie O'Ree, the first black NHL player, debuted for the Boston Bruins in 1958.
The Root
Last week’s release of Black Ice – the memoir of Val James, the first African American to play in the NHL – brought me back to when I was a teenager living in Boston. It was the winter of 1978 – the year…
The composer’s irregular heartbeat may have influenced his music.
Jim Pruitt/Shutterstock
Credibility, generally, is seen as a dividend of honesty. Tell the truth and, over time, people will come to regard you as a trustworthy person, a reliable source of information. Given this formula, the…
Why is the eastern US getting so much Arctic weather this winter?
Stuart Rankin/Flickr
Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath. Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue…
A still shot from DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Hollywood Reporter
Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
A bumble bee foraging for nectar and pollen at a turtlehead plant that produces the compound catalpol, which reduced bee parasite load.
Leif Richardson
Search for information on ‘self-medication,’ and you’ll likely find descriptions of the myriad ways that we humans use drugs to solve problems. In fact, the consumption of biologically active molecules…
Little pills with big problems.
Teens buying pills via Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
When you think about substance use and teens, drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy might come to mind. But recreational prescription drug use is a significant problem. Nationally, 17.8% of high school students…
Can you press both at the same time?
via www.shutterstock.com
President Vladimir Putin of Russia may fear that the internet is a CIA project, but unfortunately he is not alone. According to our recently released study about how the Russian public views the internet…
The Hryvna: a vulnerable currency
Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
A year after the Maidan revolution of 2014, Ukraine is at a critical juncture. The conflict with Russia has been escalating. Estimates of casualties exceed 5,000, with some reports putting the number at…
Very few people today live a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and Paleo diets likely oversimplify what would have been on the table many millennia ago.
Thiery
Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something…
How long did they wait?
Feet via wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock
Each year in the United States about 720,000 people have heart attacks and about 124,000 people in the UK and 55,000 people in Australia will have them as well. Since the 1980s, survival rates from heart…
The smartphone, and increasingly Apple’s iPhone, is the center of the fast-growing app economy.
Reuters
Even as the US economic recovery remains subpar with employment gains in only the lowest-paying jobs – and sluggish gains at that – one segment is surging: the still-nascent app industry. Apple’s latest…
A makeshift memorial for Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad and Yusor’s sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, who were killed by a gunman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last week.
Chris Keane/Reuters
If a guy kills three of his neighbors over a parking spot, it’s a local story, maybe a national news brief. Its newsworthiness is predicated on the appalling flimsiness of the casus belli: Some folks are…
The Uvas Reservoir near Silicon Valley in California, photographed about one year ago.
Ian Abbot/ Flickr
Let’s start with some old news. Earth’s climate is warming, human activities are causing it, and as long as we continue to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the impacts on climate and…
Whether man-made sources of mercury are contributing to the mercury levels in open-ocean fish has been the subject of hot debate for many years. My colleagues Carl Lamborg, Marty Horgan and I analyzed…