U.N. officials began to tour the cyclone-devastated Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar on Monday, though some U.N. staffers still reported problems gaining access to the tightly controlled country. At least 78,000 people were killed in the cyclone, and another estimated 56,000 remain missing.

They may look like big dumb lumps, but it turns out that walruses are actually musical prodigies. In fact, during mating rituals, walrus bulls seduce females with compositions that rival the songs of nightingales and humpback whales for their complexity.

In case you didn’t know, Staten Island is actually a pretty green place. In fact, New York’s least densely-populated borough is set to build the city’s first green police precinct.

While America’s reputation in the Middle East is hovering at historic lows, the demand for American university-branded education has never been greater, leading a number of U.S. schools to set up shop in Qatar–and students are flocking to these branches of America’s elite colleges.

The new building, which opens in August, will be graced by the works of Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, Martin Puryear, Maya Lin, and more–they represent a significant cross-section of American and Chinese artists, read more…

Television commercials are probably as good an indicator of a society’s cultural health as any. And anyone looking for proof of the cachet that opera once maintained in American life would do well to consider these commercials, which Rice Krispies ran in the 1960s.

On May 19, 1935, British soldier T.E. Lawrence, known to the world as “Lawrence of Arabia,” died in England, six days after being injured in a motorcycle crash. Read more about Lawrence on the site of a PBS doc from 2003:

Journalist Melody Petersen’s new book Our Daily Meds describes an industry whose core drive is profit (over science), and one that has insinuated itself, through money, into every level of drug research. See the interview.

In a presidential campaign there’s a lot of competition to raise a lot of money, and this year’s heated election comes with a trail of earnings comparisons and reports of lobbying ties–see a few good open sources.

The New York Photo Festival in Dumbo was the place to be this weekend for anyone interested in contemporary photography. That’s why I was surprised to see a 1922 historic carved wood carousel completely rehabilitated to it’s original condition among the the photo galleries in the waterfront area of Brooklyn, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass. [...]