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Catholic Church Fights Gay Marriage, Activists Regroup

When America’s Catholic bishops gather next week in Baltimore for a four-day conference, they will hear an update on the Catholic Church’s ongoing fight to convince the country that marriage as an institution should never include gay couples, and they’ll get a sneak peek at how that fight will be waged in the coming year. Videos aimed at priests and deacons are being produced in English and Spanish to give the pastors better tools to reach their parishioners, especially young people, whom the church fears need reminding about its basic teachings on marriage, love and sex.

Kristen Wiig: The Anti-Comedian

Kristen Wiig’s Saturday Night Live characters respond to social discomfort by talking too much and moving too much.

Using Twitter and Facebook to Find a Job

Brian Ward lost his job on a Friday afternoon. Eleven days later he had a new one

Education: THE CYNICAL IDEALISTS OF ’68

THE troubled and troublesome college Class of 1968 tends to have a sober, even tragic view of life. They were high school seniors in the year that John Kennedy, a politician who gained their trust and inspired their ambitions, was shot to death in Dallas.

A Tale of 600 Cities

Chongqing.

Behavior: Decision Theory: Guide to Choice-Making

TO beleaguered man, life is an uphill obstacle course. Between the cradle and the grave stretches an endless multitude of problems, every one of which cries out for decision

Secrets of the Shy

It’s hard to get much lower-tech than the laboratory of psychologist Sam Putnam at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The equipment here is strictly five-and-dime–soap bubbles, Halloween masks, noisemakers–but the work Putnam is doing is something else entirely.

Public Schools: Humanities in High School

The normal high school curriculum is a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where 100 high schools have developed experimental humanities courses, using a rough guideline prepared by state education officials

Wide Social Networks Are Key to Good Health, Says Study

A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine. Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study’s follow-up period than people with more robust social ties

10 Best TV Shows

1. THE WIRE This sprawling social drama has dozens of characters and, really, only one–Baltimore, Md