The song “The 12 Days of Christmas” paints a whimsical picture of the stretch of time between Christmas Day and Epiphany. A suitor sends a series of lavish, if impractical, gifts to his beloved. Some have attempted to claim that the song contains coded messages related to the Christian faith. In reality, this song has […]

The awkward lull between Christmas and New Year, when you don’t know your name or what day it is, poses a perfect opportunity to gorge yourself on food and movies. What can be better than ‘Ben Hur’ or ‘Doctor Zhivago’ at 10am accompanied by some piquant olives and a selection box. Despite the fact that […]

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — This year has been marked by widespread social convulsion in Latin America. Since mid-October, Chileans have been in the streets; what started as demonstrations over a subway fare hike quickly broadened into protests over enormous economic inequality. The right-wing president, Sebastian Piñera, ordered a militarized police force to suppress the protests, […]

It’s not uncommon for people to revert to an adolescent state when they return to their childhood homes over the festive season. It’s not uncommon for people to revert to an adolescent state when they return to their childhood homes over the festive season. Christmas regression, as it’s known to psychologists, is what happens when […]

To the Editor: Re “How Professors Help Rip Off Students” (Op-Ed, Dec. 12), about the exorbitant cost of textbooks: Tim Wu urges educators to explore the many options for course materials that are now available, pointing out that “instructors should at least take a look at what’s out there.” We couldn’t agree more. Education publishers […]

The idea that platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram should remove hate speech is relatively uncontroversial. But doing this isn’t easy. Hate speech is fluid, dependent on cultural context and social meaning. To manage it, platforms must constantly re-evaluate hateful symbols and communicate with users about their decision-making. Few examples illustrate this need better than […]

When Karen Mills first met her father, she was 13 and getting off a plane in New York, her first time in America. He came to pick her up at the airport, but she realized right away that he couldn’t see her. He suffered from severe glaucoma. In all the years of their long-distance phone […]

This week, Google Maps could not find me, and it seemed really pissed off. I switched all of the location-access buttons on my iPhone from “While Using the App” to “Ask Next Time,” causing my most useful app to launch a series of increasingly desperate pop-up entreaties, begging me to make my life easier by […]

When my father died, the light went out. For a few years, I’d wake at 5am and at 5.01, he would die again. It was like he couldn’t get over the novelty. In time, I slept ’til six and he gave up the dying and the light came on again. Only it was harsh and […]

When I moved to the Amazon “Wild West” town of Paragominas in northern Brazil in 1984 as a young scientist studying forest recovery on abandoned pastures, I expected a town filled with bandits and land grabbers. Instead, what I mostly found were courageous, hard-working families from across Brazil who had come to this rugged town […]