Nick Summers

Aside from the obvious changes that come with moving the Super Bowl to a cold-weather city--indoor stadium, more frostbitten tailgaters--there's this: holding the big game in Detroit makes No.

When Dr. Samuel Mudd set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865, was he in on the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, or just a country doc treating a mysterious visitor in the night?

David Burrick edits a daily newspaper in Philadelphia. When big news breaks he deploys a staff of 200 reporters and photographers, flying them across the country if necessary, keeping an eye toward his $1 million budget.

There are the books we read, the books we mean to read, and then there are the ones--c'mon, admit it--that mainly just look impressive on the shelf. Take "A Brief History of Time": the classic has sold more than 10 million copies and is hailed as brilliant--but good luck finding people who've finished it.A recent study of 2,100 Brits found that more than a third of them buy certain titles solely to look intelligent--a bit of statistical confirmation of "book snobbism," something long suspected...

Every Sunday, sports-bar owners face a perilous decision: of all the football games on all the channels on all the bar's TVs, which one matchup gets piped into the house speaker system?

As digital photography prices fall and features improve, more amateur shooters are upgrading to pro-caliber cameras. By 2007, the market is expected to more than double for digital SLRs, or single-lens reflex cameras, now that their prices have dropped below $1,000.

A landmark study with major implications for the global AIDS epidemic, published this week by French and South African researchers, seems to confirm what scientists have long suspected: that circumcision cuts the risk of HIV infection dramatically, by as much as 60 percent.

Shirley Horn, 71 With an unforgettably slow, smoky voice, Horn took her time in joining Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae as one of the century's great jazz vocalists.

In the summer of 1963, Medgar Evers was shot, four black girls were killed in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing, Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I have a dream," and Vivian Malone enrolled at the University of Alabama.

These days, wearing a rubber wristband can mean you support almost anything--yellow for cancer research, camouflage for the troops in Iraq, maroon for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers.Now you can buy bracelets to show your support for nothing at all.

As he neared hobo name No. 436 (Hot Gnome Jimmy Jackson), John Hodgman hit a wall. "I really started to doubt not just the list of 700 hobo names, but the entire project," he says, referring to his new book, "The Areas of My Expertise," a kind of almanac parody that claims to contain "complete world knowledge." "It seemed to wholly embody the madness of doing this book, filled with fake history and fake facts." Such as: the abbreviated words used by submariners to conserve oxygen, failed...

SIMON WIESENTHAL, 96A survivor of 12 concentration camps, Wiesenthal pursued Nazi war criminals around the globe for almost 60 years. The relentless investigator played a role in the capture of more than 1,100 fugitives, including "chief executioner" Adolf Eichmann, Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl and the Gestapo officer who had arrested diarist Anne Frank.

Of all the jobs in the newsroom, some seem more likely to cause burnout than others. War correspondent. Obituary writer. City-council-subcommittee-on-zoning-beat writer.

The Onion's A.V. Club--the smart, not-made-up pop-culture complement to the weekly's signature fake news items--gets home-page placement in a redesign of theonion.com; a print edition face-lift is scheduled.

CHINA: Guess Hu's Not Coming To DinnerOne might assume that a summit bringing together the world's sole superpower and its possible heir would be attended by equally great pomp and seriousness.

When the Africa Channel launches on Sept. 1, network executives hope viewers will notice what's not being broadcast: images of HIV, famine, civil war and the other crises Americans usually associate with the continent. "We're not the Discovery Channel, either," says CEO James Makawa. "We're not dealing with animals here.

How do you turn the life of Pope John Paul II--actor, foe of Nazism and communism, assassin's target, global icon, spiritual leader to more than a billion people--into a TV movie?

Pediatricians investigating seven cases of lead poisoning at Children's Hospital Boston last year were surprised when none of the usual culprits, like lead paint, seemed to be the cause.

Podcasting, that baby medium, is suddenly home to a lot of adult content. Introduced to a mainstream audience just last month, the technology--radio-like programming for your iPod--that was once the chaste province of "Geek News Central" and "Knitcast" is now reddening faces that sport those trademark white earbuds. "No matter what the technology is," says Andrew Leyden, founder of podcastdirectory.com, "sex finds a way to get involved."At podcast.net, the No. 2 most-searched-for term (right...

In reaching an agreement to resolve the longest and most destructive labor dispute in sports history last week, pro hockey skated off a very thin patch of ice--and right onto another one.

The concept behind Cereality, the chain of all-cereal-all-the-time stores, sounds like a no-brainer for a college campus: for breakfast, lunch or dinner (or maybe all three), $2.95 gets you two scoops of more than 30 brands, plus toppings from bananas to Reese's Pieces to yogurt-flax bark, doused with the milk of your choice.

Anne Bancroft, 73 Best known for her icy seduction of Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," Bancroft was a versatile and lasting actress onstage, screen and film.