NBC says Trump wanted America's nukes to be increased tenfold, prompting Tillerson to call him “a moron.” Military advisors thankfully convinced Mr. Trump otherwise.

The White House responds to NBC’s scoop by threatening to yank NBC’s license. Fortunately, NBC doesn’t have a license that Trump can yank.

Related, frighteningly: A Wall Street Journal reporter gets two years in a Turkish prison for producing “terrorist propaganda.”

Establishment California Democrats are under siege, attacked for not being sufficiently progressive.

Fires continue to rage and spread up and down California. Officials say the Northern fires may take weeks to contain.

The Weekly Standard buries the lede: McConnell upends tradition that lets Senators veto home state judges.

Football players, like all workers, are protected by law against exactly the kind of retaliation Jerry Jones plots.

ICYMI: As regionalisms disappear, Minnesotan football players still play "Duck, Duck, Gray Duck" (not Goose).

The etymology of an impossible word: "Tawdry" is actually a contraction.

The USPS thinks it can address solvency issues by pivoting to autonomous cars in the next decade.

A quick backgrounder for our frightened era: The "Nansen Passport" was the original document that allowed stateless people to travel.

Nine of the 10 worst countries for girls' education are in Africa—"a global crisis that perpetuates poverty."

Maybe you heard the one about Mark Zuckerberg touring ravaged Puerto Rico as a tone-deaf cartoon?

Here’s economist Richard Thaler, who just won the Nobel Prize (and uses his own success as an example), explaining what a “nudge” is.

The Voynich manuscript—written in an unknown language, carbon dated to around 1420, studied by endless cryptographers, and quite possibly a hoax—has never been cracked.

Online dating is good for society: it results in more interracial dating, and more marriages with higher stability rates.

Much of the universe's matter is missing. Half of it just got found in difficult-to-detect threads of gas.

“A notable astronomer could still look up at Mars and be convinced he saw canals, and a Martian race, thirsty, searching for water, desperate for our help. The women of the Harvard College Observatory were less romantic, and less wrong.” Rivka Galchen reviews a new book in which women in Cambridge made extraordinary breakthroughs in astronomy, but the 19th century didn’t really care.