Tony Dokoupil

The great recession may be to blame for stirring up the culture wars: according to a study in the winter issue of the American Sociological Review, resistance to gay marriage deepens significantly during hard times.

With more medical-marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks outlets, Denver has emerged as the per capita frontrunner for curative ganja. As more residents partake of doctor-prescribed pot, however, questions are emerging about where the line is between an employee's right to use medical marijuana and an employer's right to a drug-free office.Employers, of course, don't need to accommodate a worker who shows up stoned.

President Obama has called for a new generation of nuclear-power plants. But when he abandoned plans to store the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, he effectively forced states eager to break ground on reactors to accept the idea of keeping that waste within their borders—not a popular idea since the Three Mile Island meltdown.

Since the late 1990s, DNA evidence has cleared hundreds of people mistakenly put behind bars. In doing so, it's tarnished that staple of crime solving: the police lineup.

How the advertising boom for iPods, Kindles, and other gadgets is creating a new kind of supermodel.

Postindustrial cities, even relatively successful ones such as Pittsburgh, are trying to manage, rather than just reverse, population loss.

The rise and fall, and rise again, of New York's waterfront.

Today we have a guest post from colleague Tony Dokoupil.We had known each other just a few weeks when the fights began. They were ugly affairs, full of kicks and screams that raged all day and night.

Apple's latest operating system, known as "Snow Leopard," resolved dozens of headaches for users. But it may herald a new one for the company's marketing team: trying to come up with yet another big-cat name for the next version of the OS.

Inside a convenience store, Xenia is battling her 4-year-old son, Paulino, over buying a soft drink. She wants him to try a small size, he wants a larger one. "That one does not work," she says, referring to the rack of big cups. "These [smaller] ones do."Xenia eventually won the battle over beverages, but she may have lost the parenting war, according to a pair of new studies, highlighting how small differences in communication style can have a large impact on kids.

Steve Demeter seems like the perfect poster boy for Apple. Two years ago, the 30-year-old computer programmer became one of the first people to sell his product-a puzzle game called Trism-through Apple's App Store, a virtual marketplace where third-party software developers connect with customers wanting downloads for their iPhones.

Seeking fortune and fame, entrepreneurs rushed to create programs for Apple's App Store. That's not always what they found.

My unlikely journey to a well-coiffed place.

Over the last decade, British author Alain de Botton has built an empire out of his cotton-candy approach to big ideas. In a fistful of hits—including Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, and The Consolations of Philosophy—as well as numerous BBC and PBS documentaries, he's offered a clever look at Western civilization, all from the mercilessly pragmatic perspective of what helps people live more fulfilling lives.

Teachers are supposed to prevent harassment of students. But in a controversial case, they were allegedly the harassers.

John Yettaw, just back from his Burmese prison odyssey, explains how he unwittingly created an international diplomatic crisis.

Earlier generations of scientists didn't have to wade through quite as much preexisting work before making an original contribution. Now innovators are establishing themselves much later in life.

At least they are if you live in the Big Apple. A New Yorker leaves a smaller carbon footprint drinking a French Bordeaux shipped across the Atlantic (2.93 pounds of carbon per bottle) than drinking a Napa merlot (7.05 pounds). That's because when it comes to calculating carbon costs, the method of transportation matters as much as the distance. Shipping freight by sea generates less than half the emissions associated with airplanes and tractor-trailers.

More students than ever are interrupting their college educations to earn tuition money.

When I was young, we lived the high life. Then it all went up in smoke.

History largely records the 1930s as a bleak chapter in American life. But some famous survivors fondly recall a time of resourcefulness, altruism, and even joy.

The Missouri misfit who helped bring down Burma's future.

If you're lucky enough to have a job—especially a cushy, high-status job—you might feel guilty about how much you hate it. Prosperity perpetuated a little white lie: that work is supposed to make us happy.

In the literary world, translators are low in the pecking order. Titans like Milan Kundera and Isaac Bashevis Singer have branded them traitors for betraying the beauty of the original text, so most keep their heads down and hew closely to the source material.

What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era.

It was billed as a blog and support group for Wall Street's saddest cases: the once pampered young women forced to adjust to life without bottle service, Bergdorf Goodman accounts and boom-time sex—the collateral damage caused by thousands of points vanishing in a blink from the Dow.

West Virginia's governor is launching a massive campaign to liberate his state from ugly and unyielding stereotypes. He's got his work cut out for him.

When guys lose jobs, the TV, den and gym win. Women? Sex? Not so much.

America's all-time favorite pill isn't for birth- control, according to historian Andrea Tone. It's a potent little tranquilizer called Miltown, after the New Jersey hamlet where it was born in 1955.