The concept of "normal'' was born among astronomers. Observatories once were plagued by small discrepancies in different people's measurements of the same object, until, early in the 19th century, the mathematician Karl Gauss discovered that those errors occurred in a predictable pattern: Most came just above or below an average....

Over the next few weeks, the Obama campaign must reframe this campaign, before it settles into the story that Clinton's team is telling (she's tough, he's not; she's lunchpail, he's college-campus granola; he's talk, she's work). The campaign needs a new way to talk about the fundamental difference between these...

Last January helicopters, gunboats and troops converged on the Brooklyn Bridge to shepherd panicked evacuees through some scenes of Will Smith's civilization-collapses-leaving-you-alone-with-bloodthirsty- monsters movie, I Am Legend. A number of people complained about noise and messed-up Christmas routines caused by the film crews. A few others, though, were squicked...

"A scientist looking at nonscientific problems,'' said the great physicist Richard Feynman, "is just as dumb as the next guy.'' That's not necessarily anyone else's concern -- unless the scientist in question is claiming to speak, with scientific authority, for the rest of us.

A fresh case in point...

Friday night I went to hear Barack Obama speak at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan.

I wanted to see what the candidate is like without a screen between us. It's a natural impulse, but of course the candidate is encased in a successful image-making machine. So getting to know him...

Is there any phrase more full of joy, more optimistic and more American than "hey, anything is possible''?

For people who grew up in this country in the 1960s and 1970s, that attitude was always part of the allure of space travel. We watched the countdowns and splashdowns of astronauts,...

How's this for prejudice?

"We've been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn't feel right to some people."

So says Calvin Lanier of Washington, DC, explaining why, as a...

The Hillary juggernaut, now in full rumble, has shaken loose an old question about gender and prejudice: Does a major-party candidate lose an important number of votes by being a she instead of a he?

Sure, a recent poll says 92 percent of Americans would vote for a woman...

Last week he was asked about a new estimate of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S.-led invasion. He said the paper was "pretty well discredited."

The study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, gives a range of 400,000-800,000 deaths due to...

Two big stories in my local newspaper. In one, scholars announce that they have turned up a 1,700-year-old "Gospel of Judas,'' in which Judas betrays Jesus only because that was what Jesus wanted. (I wonder if Judas told himself, "hey, come on, think of all my years in public...

Progressives need a new way to talk about inequality. We tend to assume everyone agrees that a nation should not have executives who make 420 times more than factory workers. Or an education system in which your access to top schools has more to do with who your parents are...

Part of the endearing goofiness of the first Star Trek series was its premise that infinite tolerance and diversity eventually would prevail, because every being in every nook and corner of the universe -- even if it was a giant reptile or a troubled lava-beast -- spoke like a white...