I’m a 22-year-old freshman at a small New England liberalarts college. I take classes in subjects like writing and sociology. The school newspaper I write for is filled with aspiring muckrakers, and most people here followed Teddy Kennedy’s re-election bid with enthusiasm. A casual outside observer might say I fit the mold of the left-wing, out-of-touch, spotted-owl-saving, liberal-loving college student. A stereotypical Generation Xer suffering from a short bout of college-induced idealism, right?...

First some history: a decade ago Sen. Bob Kerrey made health care the centerpiece of his 1992 presidential campaign. Gov. Bill Clinton offered only a vague alternative, but after the election he and Hillary took a big swing at the problem. They whiffed. “Hillarycare” was a Rube Goldberg contraption that didn’t socialize medicine but certainly would have bureaucratized it further. The defeat of Clinton’s plan in 1994 led the Democrats to lose control of Congress and retreat to a so-called incremental approach....

Ah, but did they? Sure, The Sun screamed world exclusive on its front page last Friday. So how come its great rival, The Mirror, that same day had a scoop of the year banner on its front page (a claim that, within hours, had been turned into scoop of the millennium on the Mirrror’s Web site)? Because it really was the Mirror’s story. The 11 pages it had ready for Friday proved that, to say nothing of the bouquet of flowers that it delivered, on behalf of its readers, to 10 Downing Street....

To ease overcrowding inside the morgue, canopies have been set up in the parking lot beside the entrance. Beneath them, scores of exhausted workers, clad in blue paper aprons, face masks and paper bonnets unload body bags from the trucks, placing them on stretchers for inspection. But trucks from the site have arrived at a slow trickle throughout the week. Finding bodies in the mountains of tangled rubble has proved difficult....

Leadership is not necessarily innate; it can be learned. No one ever tried harder to master the art of command by sheer dint of study than the garrulous speaker of the House. His speeches are a stream of historical clichs. He has compared his legislative strategy to Grant’s Wilderness campaign, the Napoleonic wars and the design of Ford’s Mustang (““pure intuition’’). He has likened himself to archetypes as varied as Vince Lombardi, the Duke of Wellington, Thomas A....

But for Buckingham, now 21, the dream is on hold, Last December the National Collegiate Athletic Association ruled the Clemson athlete ineligible for play for one year, after discovering that he hadn’t met certain academic requirements in high school. Though officials say Buckingham was not directly involved in improper activities, his case has triggered three separate investigations into possible recruitment violations, altered transcripts and misuse of booster-club funds at Southside....

Back in May record-breaking marketing budgets threatened to drown out anything not hyped to the moon. With 35 movies opening nationwide, at least 10 of which cost around $100 million each, the summer looked ominous. But when confronted with an oppressive number of movies to see, Americans did a strange thing: they went. Hollywood’s profit margins may be shrinking because of the big budgets. But a record number of movie tickets were sold this summer, and now a record number of movies–10–should make $100 million in the United States....

According to Wojnarowski, the Celtics have “emerged among teams engaged in talks” with the Nets in a deal to acquire superstar forward Kevin Durant. Durant requested a trade earlier this summer, but Brooklyn’s astronomical asking price for the former MVP has deterred any franchise from trading for him. The Athletic’s Shams Charania provided a more in-depth look at the Celtics’ trade package, reporting that Boston offered All-Star guard Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and a draft pick to the Nets for Durant....

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. Every detail is incredibly telling and reveals a huge amount, but there’s a wonderful simplicity to Tolstoy’s fiction. “The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James. It shows that moments of revelation emerge out of the murkiness that is life. “Zeno’s Conscience” by Italo Svevo. There’s a terribly unreliable narrator, but in the end, something true comes out of it; we’re all too busy interpreting....

And then the world stopped. Cold. OK, not all the world, but most of it, and certainly everything of consequence in regard to sport. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the Premier League officially as of March 13. LFC’s derby game against Everton, which was scheduled three days later and might have contained the opportunity for Liverpool to clinch its first EPL title, was placed on hold. Which has meant 30 years of waiting plus one month … two months … ultimately, three months and five days....

As Trump acolytes, like his eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, sang praises for Trump’s 2024 campaign, many event speakers avoided endorsing the former president and interviews with attendees revealed that many aren’t prepared to commit to another Trump term just yet. The four-day event in Phoenix, Arizona, is a glaring red flag for Trump’s campaign. It signals there may not be a welcomed embrace awaiting the GOP figurehead in the Republican primaries....

Military coups have been mostly a spectator sport in Thailand, much like sex scandals in the United States. I once asked a senior Thai general after an attempted coup by army officers why the plotters had been allowed to go free after several months. In Korea, they would have been shot. He smiled. “You know,” he said, “it doesn’t snow in Thailand.” Last week it snowed in Thailand. The army tried to legitimize its coup, but this time the people of Bangkok refused to lie down....

Clinton wrongly implied that Obama had little or no accomplishments to his credit. Obama recited a list of achievements at both the state and federal level, which we found to be accurate. Obama used an outdated and probably inflated figure to support his argument that Clinton’s “mandated” health care plan would exempt a large number who currently lack insurance. Obama falsely claimed, again, that Bill Clinton’s labor secretary said his health care plan reduced costs more than his opponent’s....

Once inside a cell, the ebola virus replicates rapidly until the cell bursts, flooding the bloodstream with new viruses that seek out yet more cells. (It prefers cells that line the blood vessels, which accounts for the grotesque bleeding from nose, eyes and gums.) A normal healthy immune system could marshal resistance in perhaps three weeks, but most ebola victims don’t have that kind of time. There may be a way of buying that time....