Education

Aliens, immortality, and zombie JFK... One essential trait explains how extreme beliefs survive and thrive.

The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East.

BBC Verify has debunked videos which purport to show Pakistani attacks on Indian bases and jets crashing.

THE WORLD The first world was suffering, suffering. The second world was liberation. Liberation! But why, said the first world, does it look so much like suffering? Like suffering only once, the second world said—like suffering plus change.

Was it something to do with blow jobs? Incredulous, I looked again at page 82 of my Latin textbook, then over to the entry in the dictionary; then once more at 82. From the bottom of the page, the word I’d been puzzling over all day seemed to be leering back at me.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the summer of 2006, a nonfiction book called The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids cast an uncanny light on my late teenage years.

Which is, in fact, roughly the case. San Giorgio is a “spolia” church, in which many of the basic architectural elements were reused from older buildings. Spolia is Latin for spoils, familiar in English usage from the phrase “spoils of war.

The words were etched in four languages, scratched into the edge of the pale wood by at least a dozen different hands, perhaps over the course of decades.