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As Ronald Reagan prepared for his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in October 1980, some Reagan aides pondered how their candidate should respond if Carter unearthed some of the at-times-too-colorful things Reagan had said over the years. For example, when in 1974 Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded the distribution of free canned goods, Reagan reportedly quipped that this would be a good time for an outbreak of botulism. More ›

Reuters-Landov

We may not precisely know the scale of the illicit trafficking in fissile materials, but we do know that rogue salesmen are peddling nuclear technology on the black market. The enterprising father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan, hawked his wares for years before my group at the CIA caught him red-handed and put him out of business for selling a nuclear bomb to Libya in late 2003. More ›

New York Public Library

Mark Twain made us wait 100 years for this memoir. He’s still an enigma shrouded in a white suit. More ›

Geno Zhou / EPA-Corbis

Deng Xiaoping’s oft-repeated aphorism for the Chinese Communist Party is to “seek truth from facts.” As the recently released second-quarter GDP growth figure of 10.3 percent reminds us, this is difficult to do when it comes to the Middle Kingdom. More ›

Courtesy of Villa Paraiso

Thanks to a number of red-hot economies, led by Brazil, and successful crackdowns against crime in places like Colombia and Peru, South America has become the new hotspot for developers of high-end designer boutiques, resorts, and villas. More ›

Renold Zergat / Getty Images

As a professional linguist and lifelong word lover, I always assumed I had a good handle on regional differences in the way people talk. But in 1975, when I arrived in Madison, Wis.—the seventh state I’ve called home—I discovered major holes in my lexicon. More ›

China Photos-Getty Images

As a director, Feng has become a strong draw on his own—an anomaly in Chinese entertainment, where movie stars usually make or break a film. Since his 1994 debut film, “Gone Forever With My Love”, he has made a dozen movies, each one shattering a record in China. More ›