Jnzawacki

via George H.W. Bush

President George H. W. Bush this week joined members of his Secret Service detail in shaving his head to show his support for the two year-old son of a detail member who is being treated for leukemia and started losing his hair.

The 89 year-old commander-in-chief took the unusual step earlier this week after learning, and seeing, that many members of his security detail had already gone under the razor to show their support for young Patrick, whose father Jon is a member of the Bush Protective Division (BPD). (Surname being withheld per family’s request.)…

Once President and Mrs. Bush learned of this “Patrick’s Pals" effort, they made a donation and President Bush volunteered to shave his head as well. The Bushes lost their second child, Robin, to leukemia 60 years ago this October at the age of four.

This timelapse of the photo restoration of someone's grandma is pretty freaking incredible.

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The long wait for the royal baby is coming to an end.Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, was admitted to a London hospital in the early stages of labor shortly before 6 a.m. local time (1 a.m. ET), a palace official confirmed. Her husband, Prince William, was at her side.

Do it, Rockapella! No really, please do it. The public misses you.

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There's a lot of buzz about how President Barack Obama gave a National Medal of Arts to Star Wars creator George Lucas yesterday. But he also honored quite a few women in the ceremony. For instance: Author Joan Didion (above).

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Two weeks after State Senator Wendy Davis' 13-hour filibuster, the Texas House of Representatives provisionally approved an anti-abortion bill that many consider to be the most restrictive in the country. The vote will be finalized Wednesday, and then the measure will move to the Texas State Senate.

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As testimony for and against the Texas abortion bill continues, we have a new contender for most badass speech yet. Meet Texas resident Sarah Slamen, the soon-t0-be New Yorker brilliantly calls out her state's legislators, thanking them for finally doing their bullshit dirty work in the public eye for everyone to see. It's brave, brilliant, and inspiring. All eyes on Texas.

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Interest rates on some federal student loans – namely the Stafford loan for undergraduate students – doubled Monday to 6.8 percent.

Let’s kick off the final Mad Style of Season six [...]

The Senate is unlikely to strike a deal to prevent student loan rates from rising on July 1.On Thursday, two groups of senators -- one a bipartisan group that includes Sens.

Don Draper's childhood home on Mad Men, a Pennsylvania brothel, turns out to actually be a CGI-altered Victorian located in the Angelino Heights area of Los Angeles. 1355 Carroll Avenue, a 3,160-square-foot single family home, was built in 1887 and had a serious digital makeover to act as the broken-down ... More »

Mad Men’s elusiveness makes it a deeply frustrating, deeply satisfying show. It’s obvious in some ways and subtle in others. At times, it seems to practice a version of magician’s misdirection, convincing you that it’s up to only one thing when in fact it’s doing two or three other things ... More »

A bill that opponents claimed would virtually ban abortion in Texas failed to pass late Tuesday after lawmakers missed a deadline by just minutes.There were chaotic scenes after a filibuster attempt fell just short and protesters cheered, clapped and shouted from 11:45 p.m. to midnight and beyond as lawmakers tried to hold the vote before the session ended at midnight (1 a.m. ET).The filibuster by...

In a pair of landmark decisions, the Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the 1996 law blocking federal recognition of gay marriage, and it allowed gay marriage to resume in California by declining to decide a separate case.The court invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to gay couples who are legally married in their states, including Social Security survivor be...

World War Z, which opened over the weekend, is a film about a catastrophic zombie outbreak. If you haven't seen it yet, we're not giving away any secrets about the plot when we say that these zombies cause some major headaches for humanity — billions dead, cities in ruins, and ... More »

Of all the characters we've enjoyed these past six seasons of Mad Men, we've really rooted for Peggy Olson. In early episodes, it was hard not to find her mousy voice irritating, but she's now one of the show's most fearless, vocal personalities. In last week's episode, she barged into Don's ... More »

Last night's Mad Men showed that tensions are still running high at Sterling Cooper and Partners, but you wouldn't know it by the sight of that cool new logo of theirs. Well, AMC sent out the firm's official press release about its new name and look, written by Peggy Olson ... More »

Michigan's attorney general says the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts is not vulnerable to being sold to pay off any of the city's debt during a municipal bankruptcy.

This afternoon, the National Archives launched Founders Online—a tool for seamless searching across the Papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.  Our National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has been funding these projects in paper for some time.  Working with Rotunda at the University of Virginia Press and the editors of the six papers project, Founders Online was created with NHPRC funding to provide simultaneous searching across all six collections at once.

Through Founders Online you can now trace the shaping of the nation, the extraordinary clash of ideas, the debates and discussions carried out through drafts and final versions of public documents as well as the evolving thoughts and principles shared in personal correspondence, diaries, and journals. This beta version of Founders Online contains over 119,000 documents, and new documents will be added to the site on a continual basis.

You can see first-hand the close working partnership between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton from their time in the Revolutionary War to Hamilton’s draft of Washington’s Farewell Address.  Or read John Adams’ description of Congress as a place where “There is so much Wit, Sense, Learning, Acuteness, Subtilty, Eloquence, etc. among fifty Gentlemen, each of whom has been habituated to lead and guide in his own Province, that an immensity of Time, is … [ Read all ]

I would say Kiernan Shipka is the best-dressed cast member on Mad Men, even if I wasn’t her future best friend forever. Look at these grown-up clowns and this super-chic tween.

January Jones only got bangs because Kiernan got them first.

The Seat of the Universal House of Justice viewed through the pillars of the International Baha’i Archives.

The city of Detroit has gained much national exposure of late as case study for the potential revival of declining Rust Belt cities. And from the establishing of an Emergency Financial Manager to Dan Gilbert’s master plan to create a shiny new downtown, the city has been showing early signs of a commercial and financial comeback. But flying low under this progress is Detroit’s exciting musical resurgence.  It’s no big secret that Detroit’s Motown Records and the “Funk Brothers” shaped the American sound of the 1960s. But far fewer people are aware that the city is also the birthplace of techno. Born from a resistance to traditional pop formulas and with debts to European synthpop and various African American styles such as Chicago house and funk, Detroit’s techno movement remains vibrant to this day. This past weekend’s Movement Electronic Music Festival, the city’s signature musical event, is the ideal representative of this phenomenon. The 2013… Read More

Last night at a presentation for Stella McCartney's Spring 2014 collection, we caught up with Amy Poehler, who seemed pretty excited that Hillary Clinton had joined Twitter. "Well, here's a little secret: Hillary is hilarious," Poehler told us. "So are the people who work with her." But Hillary's hardly the ... More »

The Boston Herald reports on a project undertaken by Greenfield, MA Community College Librarian Hope Schneider.

On a wall in the corner of Greenfield Community College's Nahman-Watson Library, 128 artifacts from the library's card catalog hang preserved in a glass case — signed by the authors who penned the very books to which the cards once led.

The project has been 14 years in the making for librarian Schneider, who wanted to memorialize the cards after the library's catalog went digital in 1999. In the years that followed, Schneider sent cards to local authors and artists, asking if they would sign their card and make some contribution to the display. A decade later, after GCC's library was expanded, she resumed her quest — sending letters across the country to novelists, poets and politicians.

Library Director Deborah Chown said Schneider's project captures a time when people would find new books through serendipity — simply because it was next to another book or classified through a similar subject matter. Chown and Schneider don't deny the advantages that new library technology offers — the opportunity to search rapidly through online databases and access books, journals and newspaper articles.

But there was also some surprise and sadness when a tour of prospective students came through the library, saw the display and didn't recognize the cards.

Welcome to our new Weekly Map series, where we will highlight quirky urban maps, both vintage and present.  It’s hard not to love historical maps because beyond their geographic and demographic information, they also contain a window in time of information about the way society thought about their cities. A collection of maps and vintage photos based on the 1940 Census is available online at the fun website Welcome to 1940s New York, all sourced from a 1943 book “New York City Market Analysis” published by The New York Times, News Syndicate Co. (now The Daily News), The Daily Mirror and Hearst.  Steven Romalewski, director of City University of New York’s Urban Mapping Service, told us that he had come across the book by chance at the New York Bound Bookstore when it was going out of business in 1997, and then waited for the actual responses to the 1940 Census to be released to the…

According to a recent study, girls as young as thirteen are consuming as much alcohol as early as boys. If you're a reasonable human person over the age of, like, sixteen (+/- 2 years), your response to this tidbit will most likely be, "That seems unhealthy that children as young as thirteen are consuming alcoholic beverages. It's probably not very good for their brain development." If, however, you're like Dr. Ken "Concerned Mansplainer" Flegel, this information will fill you with a desire to sneakily victim-blame.

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After spending hours on a hot Las Vegas tarmac with no A/C, food, or water (which may not be entirely legal), passengers aboard a Phoenix-bound Allegiant Air flight decided to kick start the plane by breaking out in a spirited rendition of R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly."

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