Free Republic

Which Movies Make Grown Men Cry? After an evening at Grassroots Tavern, some friends and I got into a heated argument about “Love Actually,” which I contend is a good movie. This eventually became a slightly less heated argument about which movies make people cry. The consensus was that everyone has at least one movie that gets them. The lone dissenter was my friend Alex Kaufman, who claimed he had never cried during a movie. After we listed approximately half the films on IMDb, he eventually recanted, saying that “Saving Private Ryan” had, at points, briefly broken his steely resolve....

A NASA astronaut is charged with attacking her rival for another astronaut's attention early Monday at Orlando International Airport, the Orlando Sentinel has learned. Lisa Marie Nowak drove from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the male astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police. Nowak -- who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer -- was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bags, reports show. Once U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman arrived, Nowak followed her...

Wondering about that muffled howl you’ve been hearing the last couple weeks? It’s the sound and fury of feminists reacting to Michael Noer’s latest exegesis, Don’t Marry a Career Woman. Noer’s column, which ran at Forbes.com, surveyed marriages in which the wives doggedly pursue a high-powered career, all the while neglecting family and home. The research shows these women are more likely to be unhappy if she earns more than the guy, or if she quits her job and stays home. Either way, she’s going to be a grump. Her husband is more prone to be discontented if she is...

Low participation in math and science activities by girls is keeping them from achieving their full potential and weakening the nation's ability to compete, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Monday. "We need definitive insights into what goes wrong, when and why," Spellings said. She asked her department's Institute of Education Sciences to review existing research and determine why girls are not as well represented in the sciences as boys. Schools have put more emphasis on math in the past five years because of the No Child Left Behind law, which requires testing and yearly progress in the subject. "This is...

Some people like to think that men and women are becoming increasingly alike in our unprecedentedly equal society. A few even try to maintain that nearly all gender differences are acquired rather than innate. A quick way to realise neither claim is true is to look at what men and women read for pleasure. Let us take the two nationwide bestselling mass market fiction titles, after the dreadful productions of Dan Brown and Patricia Cornwell have been discounted. Love and Devotion by Erica James (Orion, 536 pages, £6.99) sold 18,188 copies last week; The Increment by Chris Ryan (Arrow, 440...

Fox News just broke into the NASA press conference. Doesn't sound good at all, seems like three failed comm attempts, two from orbiters and one from Earth; it's not just the bad weather in Australia. He was being a bit technical but it does not sound good at all.