It’s true. I thought cheese was the color of a traffic cone, each slice individually wrapped in plastic.

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs.

The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years.

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.

In college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college — brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary.

The Russians are coming from all over.

American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was reassuring to them.

Rio’s slums, or favelas, have proliferated and now may number more than 800.

Destee Nation is not selling nostalgia or hipster kitsch but romance — the romance of the American small business, the neighborhood diner, the old bar, the mom-and-pop shop that has managed to linger into the era of big-box chains.