By PAUL F. CAMPOS, Scripps Howard News Service

If you knew nothing about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama other than that Clinton is a 60-year-old white woman and Obama is a 46-year-old black man, you could still calculate the odds that each was in prison.

A friend of mine committed suicide earlier this month. That's one way of describing what happened.Another way of describing the event would be to say she died from anorexia nervosa.Yet another description would be to say she was killed by a culture that, from the time she was a little girl, tormented her constantly about her body.

Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins? That question occurred to me last week, while attending a lecture at which Fish, the well-known literary and legal theorist, did the thing he always does, which is to make the following point over and over again:

The very first video aired on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." I recently entered the wonderful world of high-definition-television ownership, and after a few months I'm beginning to wonder how many careers will be killed by HDTV.

Because I'm an upper-class American, I often get expensive stuff for free.

One of the curiosities of American politics is the media's ongoing infatuation with John McCain. A bit of this is based on things such as McCain's opposition to torture (unfortunately, we can no longer treat opposing torture like opposing child molestation, i.e., something one assumes is standard equipment in a presidential candidate rather than a luxury upgrade).

Two classic questions that confront medical science are how to define disease and how to measure and treat pain. Both questions are brought into sharp relief by the controversy over fibromyalgia.

Last year, the remarkable television series "The Wire" featured a scene in which Marlo Stanfield, a young man who combines entrepreneurial ambition with ruthless violence while taking ove

Last weekend I dipped a toe into the sewers of right-wing talk radio, and listened to a rant by Michael Savage, during which the nationally syndicated commentator suggested that America's heal

News that the CIA destroyed tapes of interrogations during which al Qaeda operatives were tortured has elicited little public reaction.