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privacy is in turn the basis of a person's capacity for friendship and intimacy. [People] who lose the guarantee of privacy also eventually lose the capacity for making friends.

What is unsettling is that so many of us are voluntarily declining this right to privacy, and opening up our lives to a vast consortium of various, and often spurious, acquaintances: "Facebook friends."

Aside from the basics -- relationship status (whether listed or unlisted, have a look at the photo albums -- you'll know), age, school and other categories such as employment, by reading between the lines you will discover a wealth of information about poor Joe's hapless existence: his income, the details of his social life, if he got fat(ter), if his Grandma/dog/dealer died, what he's eating, the movies he likes, the movies he doesn't like, if he got dumb(er), if he's getting any, if he's a drunkard, if he drives a Camaro, if he voted for Obama (he didn't), if he watches Glenn Beck (he does), etc. etc. etc. It is likely that you will be able to determine, in a very real sense, the nature of Joe's current existence, warts and all.

In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed.

dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died

Gun violence has regularly been at the political forefront since Newtown. While Congress failed to pass a background check bill four months after the devastation, state lawmakers nationwide approved more than a hundred laws either strengthening or weakening restrictions on firearms in the first year after Sandy Hook alone

“If you watch the nightly news it feels like the world is falling apart,” Obama said at a fundraiser last month. He’s half correct. Not many people watch the actual nightly news anymore, but millions watch the cinéma vérité of horrible things, from punching a loved one to beheading a journalist.

The president understands this dynamic, yet he seems helpless to do anything about it. He’s as reactive as the rest of the world. Nearly 200,000 people have died and three million refugees are wandering in despair because of the Syrian conflict. But the American public was resolute in not wanting any part of it until the beheadings of two of our citizens appeared.

“All you need to do is see the videos of the beheadings and we’re not worried about mission creep,”

"He died last summer," says Trina quietly. "He was very involved in preservation. It concerned him that the next generation wouldn't have that connection. He used to teach the Maidu language, but most of the people who wanted to learn weren't those with Native American ancestors or any experience of it. They would have conversations but I couldn't recognize their pronunciation."

Language is a potent force - more than the words alone, it can communicate a community's mindset, attitudes and priorities.

For a few bucks off and the pleasure of shopping from bed, have we handed over a precious natural resource — our nation’s books — to an ambitious billionaire with an engineering degree?

France, meanwhile, has just unanimously passed a so-called anti-Amazon law, which says online sellers can’t offer free shipping on discounted books. (“It will be either cheese or dessert, not both at once,” a French commentator explained.)

Amazon has a 10 or 12 percent share of new book sales in France. Amazon reportedly handles 70 percent of the country’s online book sales, but just 18 percent of books are sold online.

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.

In soccer, almost no task, except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual. Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space around you, you’ll have three or four options on where to distribute it. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it; it is defined by the context created by all the other players.

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

I’m pursuing French citizenship. The whole procedure can take years. Amid repeated requests for new documents, some would-be French people just give up.

This may be by design. “The difficulty of the ordeal seems a means of testing the authenticity of his/her commitment to the project of becoming French,” the sociologists Didier Fassin and Sarah Mazouz concluded in their 2009 paper “What Is It to Become French?” Officials can reject an applicant because he hasn’t adopted French values, or merely because his request isn’t “opportune.”

There’s a long tradition of Frenchification here. Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte and spoke French with a thick Corsican accent. He and others spent the 19th century transforming France from a nation with a patchwork of regional languages and dialects to one where practically everyone spoke proper French.

When I was in high school, I chose to major in English in college because I wanted to be wiser. That’s the word I used. If I ended up making lots of money or writing a book, great; but really, I liked the prospect of being exposed to great thoughts and deep advice, and the opportunity to apply them to my own life in my own clumsy way. I wanted to live more thoughtfully and purposefully

Now I’m a veteran English teacher, reflecting on what’s slowly changed at the typical American public high school—and the word wisdom keeps haunting me. I don’t teach it as much anymore, and I wonder who is.

how teachers are now being informed by the Common Core State Standards—the controversial math and English benchmarks that have been adopted in most states—and the writers and thought leaders who shape the assessments matched to those standards. It all amounts to an alphabet soup of bureaucratic expectations and what can feel like soul-less instruction. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium—referred to in education circles simply as "SBAC"—is the association that writes a Common Core-aligned assessment used in 25 states

Max Planck won a Nobel prize for his revolutionary work in quantum mechanics, but it was his interest in the philosophy of science that led to what is now called “Planck’s Principle.” Planck argued that science was an evolving system of thought which changes slowly over time, fueled by the deaths of old ideas. As he wrote in his 1968 autobiography: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Is our understanding of the world based in pure objective reason, or are the theories that underpin it shaped by generational biases? Do our most famous thinkers actually block new ideas from gaining ground?

A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that fame does play a significant role in deciding when and whether new scientific ideas can gain traction. When a prominent scientist dies, the paper’s authors found, the number of articles published by his or her collaborators tends to fall “precipitously” in the years following the death — those supporters tend not to continue advocating for a once-famous scientist’s ideas once the scientist is gone.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve long wondered why some people get ill in the face of stress and adversity — either mentally or physically — while others rarely succumb.

not everyone gets PTSD after exposure to extreme trauma, while some people get disabling depression with minimal or no stress

What makes people resilient, and is it something they are born with or can it be acquired later in life?

A recent study by Common Sense Media, a parent advocacy group, found that 59 percent of parents think their teens are addicted to mobile devices. Meanwhile, 50 percent of teenagers feel the same way. The study surveyed nearly 1,300 parents and children this year.

“It’s not as obvious as substance addiction, but it’s very, very real,” said Alex, a 22-year-old who had been at reSTART for five days with a familiar story: He withdrew from college because he put playing games or using the Internet ahead of going to class or work.

His parents, he said, had always encouraged him to use technology, without realizing the harm it could do. They were just trying to raise their son in a world soaked in technology that didn’t exist when they were his age.

People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen

It has been many months of allegations and arguments that the internet in general and social media in particular are pulling society down instead of lifting it up.

That has inspired a good deal of debate about more restrictive futures for Facebook and Google. At the furthest extreme, some dream of the companies becoming public utilities.

Boys with eccentric parents—not to mention boys who love fantasy fiction—tend to develop a sense of empathy, partly because they know what it’s like to be the weird kid at school

After Harvard, Douthat lived with Reihan Salam, who became his coauthor on the 2008 book Grand New Party, a set of prescriptions for the embattled GOP. Salam, a secular Muslim from working-class Brooklyn, related easily to Douthat. “He, too, came from a marginal place,” Salam tells me. “He didn’t have the classic upbringing you’d expect from an Ivy League student. It has given him a kind of outsider take.”

Douthat does have a Catholic’s profound sense that sin is real, and he is always on high alert for the perversion of virtue.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides,” he said Saturday.

It is important when you consider the situation of a man whose face has been crushed by a boot to wonder if any damage might have been done to the boot.

At what point can we stop giving people the benefit of the doubt? “Gotta Hear Both Sides” is carved over the entrance to Hell. How long must we continue to hear from idiots who are wrong? I don’t want to hear debate unless there is something legitimately to be debated, and people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not among those things. They are self-evident, or used to seem so.

In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their contact with germs. The approach was a catastrophe. Thirty-seven percent of the babies died before reaching age 2.

It turns out that empathetic physical contact is essential for life. Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together.

The famous Grant Study investigated a set of men who had gone to Harvard in the 1940s. The men who grew up in loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from loveless ones. They suffered from far less chronic illness and much lower rates of dementia in old age. A loving home was the best predictor of life outcomes.

“We have the mantra that we’re the strongest on the planet, that we’re indestructible,” Sgt. Musil said of the paratroopers. But, he admitted, “we’re scared.”

Over the past decade, the men rarely got together, and when they did, it was likely for a funeral. In September, there was another one when a Bravo Company veteran, Derek Hill, shot himself after returning from a job as a contractor in Iraq.

Then the suicides began, including the sergeant’s best friend, Alan, who during what seemed to be a flashback shot two neighbors before apparently realizing what he had done and turning the gun on himself.

The physics of atoms and their ever-smaller constituents and cousins is, as Adam Becker reminds us more than once in his new book, “What Is Real?,” “the most successful theory in all of science.” Its predictions are stunningly accurate, and its power to grasp the unseen ultramicroscopic world has brought us modern marvels.

But there is a problem: Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird. It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.

Indeed, Heisenberg said that quantum particles “are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

Our family life is now focused on three-month windows of normalcy between my wife’s CT scans.

Contemplating these things, last November I posted a short essay on my website of things I would want my children to know if their mother and I died before they woke.

I want them to do what is right, not what is popular, and I want them to measure their self-worth by being ethical individuals, not by the applause they receive on social media.

I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement

Mr. Manuel is an author, activist and poet. When he was 14 years old, he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole and spent 18 years in solitary confinement.

Imagine living alone in a room the size of a freight elevator for almost two decades.