Aug. 22 is a holiday in Russia: It’s Flag Day. But it ranks low in the hierarchy of holidays. There will be no parade, like there is on Victory Day. Russians will not get a day off, like they do on May Day, Russia Day, International Women’s Day, Defenders of the Fatherland Day and a half-dozen other holidays. A visitor to the country would be unlikely to notice that this month Russia is marking the 25th anniversary of a historical milestone.

Opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former colleagues who have fallen from favor seem to be dying at an unusual rate. Russia-watchers believe the deaths are not random.

I used to argue passionately that video games were art. Then I stopped arguing about it, because why bother? Of COURSE video games are art. Now I see that it's a waste of time thinking of video games as art. Why would we game designers ever aim that low? I Don't Want Art. I Want Transportation.

Following a long series of unsuccessful attempts at developing a workable lightbulb, Thomas Edison is supposed to have said, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This quote comes irresistibly to mind when thinking about Tony Blair’s famous commitment to “what works”, as opposed to ideology, in public policy. In retrospect, it seems that Blair, and like-minded reformers throughout the English-speaking world, have delivered an Edison in reverse.

To understand why, despite the recent funeral orations, liberalism is very much alive, you have to go back to the 1860s and the abolition of slavery in two key countries. To be precise, 1863, when – in one of the great coincidences of history – the proclamations of liberty for the American slaves and the Russian serfs came just five weeks apart.

I have just come across an International Monetary Fund working paper on income polarization in the United States that makes an important contribution to the secular stagnation debate. The authors — Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga and Juan Solé — use standard econometric techniques to estimate the impact of declines in middle class incomes on total consumer spending. They find that polarization has reduced consumer spending by more than 3 percent or about $400 billion annually. If these findings stand up to scrutiny, they deserve to have a policy impact.

Both Brendan and I have written about the strange martyrdom of Louis Smith. But here is an ugly coda. As readers may recall, the Olympic athlete got drunk at a friend’s wedding and, along with a friend, ended up doing a joke version of the Muslim call to prayer. Something to do with Aladdin apparently. Anyhow, before they knew it the phone-video had made its way onto social media and from there to The Sun. Soon sinister Muslim spokespeople were reminding everyone that their religion was to be ‘respected’ and never to be ‘mocked’. Smith has apparently been getting death threats since then.

What if the United States went to war and nobody here even noticed? The question is absurd, isn’t it? And yet, this almost perfectly describes what actually happened this past week. While many Americans, myself included, were all hypnotized by the bizarre spectacle of the Republican nominee for president, a US navy destroyer fired a barrage of cruise missiles at three radar sites controlled by the rebel Houthi movement in Yemen. This attack marked the first time the US has fought the rebels directly in Yemen’s devastating civil war.

Stephen Hawking is looking up. The man who's offered portentous views of our future has begun, it seems, to see a little light. It could be a laser headed to blow us all up, of course. But for now, let's pretend it isn't. On Wednesday, the celebrated physicist was speaking at Cambridge University's new Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence.

The business world is right – let’s just get on with the third Heathrow runway, and the extinction of all life on Earth while we’re at it – why delay the inevitable?

“What the heck is happening at Apple?” people ask me. “Has the company lost its mojo? Why no new product categories? Why didn’t Apple, instead of AT&T, buy Time Warner? And why are the new MacBook Pros so darned expensive? After first getting out of the way the fact that Apple is still the richest public company in the history of public companies, let’s take these questions in reverse order beginning with the MacBook Pros. In addition to their nifty OLED finger bar above the keyboard, these new Macs seem to have gained an average of $200 over the preceding models of the same size. What makes Apple think they can get away with that?

How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? “We could shoot him,” Sir David Attenborough has suggested in an interview revealing a steely political edge behind the cuddly image. The veteran natural history broadcaster criticised the Republican presidential candidate’s climate change denial and said that the UK’s Brexit “mess” was the result of an …

Designed for the railroad era, they have no place in our globalized, interconnected world.

A month ago I tried to write a column proposing mean nicknames for president-elect Donald Trump, on the basis that it would be funny to turn the tables on him for the cruel diminutives he applied to others. I couldn’t pull it off. There is a darkness about Trump that negates that sort of humor: a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound that no insult could plumb its depths. He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women...

All politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They moan about bias. They talk to friendlies only. They manipulate reporters and squirm their way out of questions. And this all makes perfect sense, because politicians and the press are, or used to be, natural enemies.

The lunatic notion of a “post-truth” or “post-fact” society gained traction during the administration of George W. Bush, whose lackeys lied their heads off so spectacularly and for so long, with the aid of the effectively state-sponsored Fox News Network. Mocked as “truthiness” by Stephen Colbert in 2005, and soberly analyzed in various books, the key idea of the “post-truth” society was this: if a given public utterance had sufficient appeal — emotional, political or otherwise — its empirical truth was immaterial.

A federal audit raised “significant concerns” about the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s “long-term and lucrative relationships” with its confidential sources. Over 9,500 sources received $237 million in payments from the DEA, the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice found. If an informant’s tip leads to a successful civil or criminal forfeiture, the source can receive up to $500,000 or 25% of the seized cash, whichever is less, according to the DEA Special Agents Manual.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld.

Some politicians are desperate to portray themselves as being on the right side of populist movements rejecting the political establishment. Delivering the Charles Kennedy memorial speech, Nicola Sturgeon says she is concerned about the “disillusionment in politics” and speaking to Labour’s national policy forum, Jeremy Corbyn talks of how people “know the status quo is failing them”.

When I teach practical ethics, I encourage my students to take the arguments we discuss outside the classroom. For Americans, there is no better occasion for a conversation about the ethics of what we eat than Thanksgiving, the holiday at which, more than any other, we come together around a meal. The traditional centerpiece of the Thanksgiving meal is a turkey, so that is the obvious place to start. According to the National Turkey Federation, about 46 million turkeys are killed for Thanksgiving each year. The vast majority of them — at least 99% — are raised on factory farms.