Jess Lahitou

Is there a difference between what the cigs biz did back in the 1950s and ‘60s and the way present-day pharmaceutical companies have aggressively marketed opioids like OxyContin?

Will every story that Trump doesn’t approve of get the “fake news” label, its authors permanently blacklisted forever?

As Tom Nichols puts it, ignorance has now become a "virtue." And it takes a whole lot of it to claim you can learn 'everything' about a complex subject - like, say, nuclear weapons - in roughly 90 minutes.

To her own admitted surprise, Fessler discovered that meaningless, detached hookups were emphatically not bringing any kind of bliss to college women.

So I don’t approve, in general, of how my generation tends to come at things, with the focus on: me, my experience, my

Wayne Tracker. When I first came across this made-up alias, it didn’t speak to me like someone’s first and last name.

I’m not one for overstatement; the research here is rock solid. And while “serve and return” is borrowed lingo from tennis (hopeful we have some fellow Del Potro fans in the house), the practice has nothing at all to do with sports.

When it comes to babies, “serve and return” refers to meaningful, face-to-face interaction with the little one. The sort of conversation where you’re not just talking at baby, but watching his reactions, and responding in kind.

The blatant promise of a career in the spotlight has stripped the Bachelor/Bachelorette of its beautiful, benign lie: that we could watch “regular” people navigate the perils and pitfalls of modern dating, that such a quest was in and of itself enough, and that a happy ending was a real possibility.

The 2016 election has, for a while now, felt eerily akin to 1984 (lots ‘o doublespeak coming out of Trump and his supporters). Or The Hunger Games, to take a more recent example of dystopian genre fiction. Wherein, government becomes solely about politics and the media spectacle, rather than actual policies and ideas.

The year ahead promises to be a whopper of political intrigue, events, and (probably) scandal. Here are the top stories to watch as we head into the hype that comes but once every four years: A presidential election.