For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

'Suicide' blast at court complex kills 12, injures more than 30, a day after a deadly explosion in the Indian capital.

One of Israel’s biggest companies is taking over huge swaths of US real estate—and tenants are paying the price.

The church unveiled new, skimpier garments. But the right to bare shoulders is causing a stir.

The driver of a stolen van sped through Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, eventually driving into Mexico to evade the California Highway Patrol, officials said.

on long covid, hypochondria, and the forums

Other than some time off every year for Christmas, Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne have delivered a new Oglaf comic, skewering fantasy tropes with absolutely not safe for work humor, every week since 2008. Which, if you do some quick napkin math, makes it nearly old enough to pass its own age check. That’s quite a remarkable run for a sexually explicit, gag-a-week strip with only a handful of recurring characters and no ongoing storyline. But despite that longevity, Oglaf’s creators have rarely spoken in public. Their social media presence is limited to posting the latest comic, and the Oglaf website has remained virtually unchanged since its inception, with no credits of any kind. It turns out this is not because of any desire to stay anonymous, as I discovered when they happily agreed to talk for this interview. Trudy and Doug braved a 14-hour time difference to speak over Zoom, and armed with their morning caffeine, spoke candidly with me about the origins of the strip, their utter lack of planning, the benefits of shame, and how, despite its very long run, an end to Oglaf may be coming sooner than you think.

Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation has become what its president, Kevin Roberts, now hails as the “intellectual backbone” of the conservative movement. It crafted the policy blueprint that powered President Ronald Reagan’s right-wing revolution — and today, under Roberts’s leadership, it’s once again shaping the machinery of power. Through its highly controversial Project 2025 — a plan widely credited to Roberts as its chief architect — Heritage laid out a road map for President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda. But Roberts’s recent missteps have rattled the institution, raising strong questions about his leadership — and the future direction of the conservative movement itself. Roberts gained widespread attention in July 2024 when he issued a warning to Democrats: “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

[STAT senior science writer Sharon Begley wrote this remembrance of James Watson before she herself died in 2021. ] When biologist James Watson died on Thursday at age 97, it brought down the curtain on 20th-century biology the way the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the same day in 1826 (July 4, since the universe apparently likes irony) marked the end of 18th-century America. All three died well into a new century, of course, and all three left behind old comrades-in-arms. Yet just as the deaths of Adams and Jefferson symbolized the passing of an era that changed the world, so Watson’s marks the end of an epoch in biology so momentous it was called “the eighth day of creation.” Do read some of the many Watson obituaries, which recount his Nobel-winning 1953 discovery, with Francis Crick, that the molecule of heredity, DNA, takes the form of a double helix, a sinuous staircase whose treads come apart to let DNA copy itself — the very foundation of inheritance and even life. They recount, too, Watson’s post-double-helix accomplishments, such as pulling Harvard University’s biology department, with its focus on whole animals (“hunters and trappers,” the professors were called) kicking and screaming into the new molecular era in the 1970s. Watson also transformed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York’s Long Island — which he led from 1968 to 2007 — into a biology powerhouse, especially in genetics and cancer research. And starting in 1990 he served as first director of the Human Genome Project, giving his blessing to an effort that many biologists viewed with disdain (a Washington power struggle forced him out in 1992). What follows is more like the B side of that record. It is based on interviews with people who knew Watson for decades, on Cold Spring Harbor’s oral history, and on Watson’s many public statements and writings. Together, they shed light on the puzzle of Watson’s later years: a public and unrepentant racism and sexism that made him a pariah in life and poisoned his legacy in death.

It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

As the holiday season fast approaches, Target is urging its employees to add a little more “jolly” to their work routine.

Most commentators, including me, concluded that the Tuesday election victory saved Democrats from capitulating to Republican demands to pass a simple continuing resolution to re-open the government, in exchange for vague assurances of a vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies that amount to nothing. But my reporting finds that at the Thursday meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus, two days after the election, Democrats very nearly capitulated once again. Here’s what occurred. It has been widely assumed that the group of eight mostly centrist Senate Democrats, who have been looking to broker a hollow deal on Republican terms, were free-lancing. In fact, they were acting with the express approval of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and were reporting to him daily. At Thursday’s meeting, they told their caucus colleagues that they now had ten votes to re-open the government in exchange for no real Republican concessions. At that, much of the rest of the caucus went ballistic, and some of the supposed ten said that, in fact, they were not willing to vote for any such deal.

... We talk a lot about the “male loneliness crisis” but in my estimation we don’t talk enough about the “male suckerfication crisis”: The process by which young men are continuously cultivated--by politicians, influencers, podcasters, sportscasters, and the very structure of social networks--as dupes and suckers... .

Recipients have become political pawns. They explained, in their own words, what Trump withholding funds has been like.

Iran’s capital is facing an unprecedented water and energy crisis as reservoirs supplying the city plunge to historic lows, threatening supplies of drinking water and electricity generation

If you go to a college football game, the feds have cameras on you.

The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

A 23-year-old man killed himself in Texas after ChatGPT ‘goaded’ him to commit suicide, his family says in a lawsuit.

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show. A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products. On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states. Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads. The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests.

Maria Florinda Rios Perez, a 32-year-old mother of four, was fatally shot as she tried to enter a Whitestown, Indiana, home to clean it.