Traditionally, a semaphore was an apparatus featuring colored lights and mechanical arms, which allowed for simple visual signals to be conveyed from a distance. Such a device was used, for example, to signal the driver of a train that the track ahead...

To meet the need for swift communication between Napoleon's (1769-1821) far-flung armies in the 1790s, the Frenchman Claude Chappe (1763-1805) invented an optical-relay system of visual telegraphs that he called the semaphore. His system consisted of...

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The heat of summer seems to bring out obscure oddities plucked from the overstocked greenhouse of Western classical music. For some time, no festival has been more avid in pursuit of the unfamiliar than Bard SummerScape, whose guiding spirit is Bard College president Leon Botstein,...

The heat of summer seems to bring out obscure oddities plucked from the overstocked greenhouse of Western classical music. For some time, no festival has been more avid in pursuit of the unfamiliar than Bard SummerScape, whose guiding spirit is Bard College president Leon Botstein,...

As a not-so-newly divorced woman with an eight-and-a-half-year-old daughter, I have lately developed a habit of grilling married couples with the same intensity and awed fascination that I imagine Charles Darwin felt for his Galapagoan critters: What magical beasts are these, and how did they...

[From The Oprah Winfrey Show, May 23, 2005.]TOM CRUISE: I'm gone. I don't care. OPRAH WINFREY: Are you sleeping? Are you getting enough sleep? CRUISE: No, no, I'm not. WINFREY: No, no, no. I heard you …. CRUISE: No, we got here last night. We...