The desperate search for missing honors student Phylicia Barnescame to a heartbreaking end Thursday, after an autopsy determined that a body pulled from the Susquehanna River was that of the North Carolina teen who vanished from Baltimore in December.

It’s in this light that the behavior of the two main American political parties over the last thirty years needs to be understood. Since 1984, the Democrats’ strategy has been to denounce the Republicans during each presidential campaign and then, once in office, copy GOP policies letter for letter, with the occasional sop thrown to their erstwhile allies now and then for form’s sake.

THIS is the story a friend told me: One night at a gathering at an apartment in New York City, a woman blithely announced, “I would pay someone to have sex with my husband.” There were snorts and yips of laughter. I believe one woman even clapped. “What did they mean?” I asked my friend. “ ‘Here’s to no sex with our husbands ever again?’ ‘Here’s to the end of sex?’ ”
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And what did you find out?

We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another.

1. BP is gunning to get back to drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the Department of Interior issued its first deepwater permit since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it was for a well that BP owns half of.

Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it. I spend much of my time working as a curator in Britain's historic royal palaces. But recently, for a television series, I've visited a lot of normal homes dating from the Norman period to the present day, and I've concluded that the houses of the past have a huge amount to teach us about the future. When the oil runs out, I think our houses will become much more like those of our low-tech, pre-industrial ancestors.

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers, have been hiring abroad while cutting back at home, sharpening the debate over globalization's effect on the U.S. economy.

The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show. That's a big switch from the 1990s, when they added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad.

Grete Waitz, who won nine New York City marathons and the silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, has died of cancer. She was 57.

Helle Aanesen, the manager of the Active Against Cancer Foundation in Norway, said Waitz died early on Tuesday in an Oslo hospital. Waitz had been battling cancer for six years.

Waitz won her first New York City marathon in 1978, setting a world best in two hours, 32 minutes and 30 seconds. She went on to win eight more times, with her last victory coming in 1988.

Activists and radicals are prone to dismiss mainstream politicians as cynical and self-serving, but this comes from a distorted view of what politics are and can do. We may live in offices and eat processed food, our social behavior is still rooted in our evolutionary history as pack hunters and primates. Archaic human societies were ruled by coalitions, most of the time a strongman and his lieutenants, with a number of social devices designed to make sure he is dependent upon his followers for his continued dominance.

It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of "Atlas Shrugged," the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as "Twilight" has among teen girls.
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Just as influential was what did not happen: the terrible moment — long feared among whites — when slaves would rise up and slaughter their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of slaves did not want vengeance: they simply wanted to be free and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war. Millions of white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free.