* Collected from the shutdown: Guess the political grimace. * Biden welcomes EPA workers with muffins and hugs. * Also for your afternoon break: The National Zoo animal cams are back. * The "best" moments from the shutdown. * The craft beer craze hits Paris—enough to coin a new term, bièrologues, aka
* Two years later, American governance is behaving as though it deserves to be downgraded. * What the GOP in Congress would look like as clowns, which, well. * During last night's House vote, a stenographer lost her composure and was removed from the floor. * America is governed by entitlements because
* Liveblogging the debt negotiations as tomorrow morning's default deadline looms. * Nations with a history of default weigh in on America's debacle. * Every day the NSA collects an estimated half-million address lists from live-chat services and web-based email. * The government has kept using Windows
* A brief history of lust intercepting foreign policy. * The journey to Mecca is not what it was 100 years ago; hotels dot the landscape, one so grand it towers over the Kaaba. * Snorkeler finds carcass of 18-foot-long oarfish, a creature that normally roams 3,000 feet under the
Giant Chinese pigeons, Scarlett Johansson’s daughter, and deliberately un-green urban living: What to expect from London, Los Angeles, and Moscow in 2040, 2070, and 2100.
* White House rejects House Republicans' counterproposal that tacks on more changes to Obamacare. * After the Balkans and before the war on terror, a military guide to PsyOps. * When a woman kisses a man, she might be subconsciously detecting and scrutinizing his chemical signals. * Doctors worry a new wave of
Going on a five-day cleanse—subsisting on a diet of shots, smoothies, very few actual foods, and no caffeine—leads to visions of apocalypse. From 2013, a quest to find the seven billionth child on Earth.
* The deal to end the shutdown, and how it could still go wrong. * The shutdown halts NIH's ability to approve new treatment in drug trials for 200 people a week, many of them fatally ill children. * Since the shutdown began, the White House's vegetable garden has
* Columbus Day does not commemorate discovery, but, rather, the ambiguous "landing." * Vent your shutdown frustrations: Take a drink, enter your number, and drunk dial Congress. * While you sleep, your brain moves memories from short-term to long-term storage. * In a very short period Mozambique saw colonialism, post-
* More Snowden fallout as all major internet organizations unanimously move to end U.S. online dominance. * Buzzfeed is going global by crowdsourcing the translation of its content to foreign-language speakers learning English. * A new report finds only a third of the global population between 15 and 24 are true
