The range and variety of Jane Smiley's work as a writer of fiction have resulted in a great deal of critical attention, a wide and committed readership, and several different perceptions of her achievement. Smiley's novels, particularly those following T...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jane Smiley has also won acclaim for her work as an author of short fiction. In The Age of Grief: Stories and a Novella (1987), Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas (1989), The Life of the Body: A Story (1990), and...

Global Warming: If the rock stars who flew hundreds of thousands of miles in their jets to save the earth wanted to hug trees, they could have hugged the forest that once covered Greenland.We didn't see Sheryl Crow passing out single-sheet allotments of toilet paper...

Thanks in part to the Gulf Stream, palm trees survive the winter in southwestern England and the fjords of Norway never freeze. Here's how it works:As the Gulf Stream flows northward, the surface water evaporates because of the temperature difference between the warm tropical water...

An ice sheet in Antarctica that is the world's largest _ with enough water to raise global sea levels by 200 feet _ is relatively stable and poses no immediate threat, according to new research.While studies of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show...

Most climate researchers use weather balloons, satellites, deep-sea submersibles or ice-drilling rigs to mine their data on global warming. A biologist at the University of Washington has turned to a more inventive method: attaching instruments to the backs of narwhals, marine mammals with unicorn-like tusks...