On a recent visit to Baltimore, singer-songwriter Adam Klein found the ideal venue to perform songs from an album he is writing about Nicaragua.

It wasn't glamorous: Just a corner kitchen in an aging warehouse, where a handful of people gathered around a pizza box. But Klein...

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle. That's James Carville's pithy verdict on the political map of Pennsylvania. From the big-picture perspective of presidential politics, he's right (with some qualification). But all that "Alabama" in the center of the Keystone State is no monolith.

Different ways of...

I was strolling on the edge of a park in St. Petersburg, debating where to stop for coffee, when I heard a commotion on the opposite sidewalk.

A stout woman was chasing a stocky man. Judging by the sweat stain on the fugitive's shirt, they had been running for a...

The best memorial to the Holocaust that I have seen surprises you from a corner of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek in northern Israel.

A gentle, green slope drops off into a basin of Jerusalem stone. The solitary figure of a woman rises over the basin's walls. Her face is turned into...

A few dozen socialists in the north of Israel met recently to raise glasses of wine and toast their latest business success.

The residents of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek were celebrating the returns of another strong year for Tama, their plastics company. As I explained in my

Israel was built in places like Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek, a hilly village whose roughly 1,000 residents share a view of the northern Jezreel Valley - and just about everything else you might need in life.

Assets here are jointly owned, from cars to homes to businesses. All members...

BERLIN -- Fikret Arik had owned his BMW for less than two years when he watched it go up in flames last October in the courtyard of his apartment building.

Vehicle damages are Arik's bread and butter - he runs a business that assesses losses for clients making insurance claims...

BERLIN -- At dusk, the Sluggers warm up for the second practice of the season.

Gray apartment buildings loom over the team from right field. Their windows reflect the orange sun descending behind the third-base line. The players get into two facing rows in center field. Gloves start to pop....

BERLIN -- Who in Germany stands in the public and badly English speaks will for that be punished.

The architecture of a German sentence is complicated and beautiful, but it doesn't always translate well into English. And to a German-trained tongue, English pronunciation can be almost as challenging as the...