Like middle-aged women dying their hair fluorescent colors and young women dying their hair iron gray, DNA testing has become fashionable even without necessarily leading to positive results.Do we really need to know more about our ancestral heritage, as if we’re characters out of “Game of Thrones” and desperate to figure out whether to pledge allegiance to wolves, dragons or the incestuous Lannisters, thereby becoming part of some larger powerful dynasty?While finding out information about your

It’s time for Australian legislators and jurists to end a juvenile tussle about citizenship and who can serve in government. Their future depends on it.There is almost daily hysteria in Australia over a formerly obscure clause in the constitution that bars dual nationals from sitting in the federal parliament. The question is which legislators are now disqualified because they did (or didn‘t) know that their birth abroad -- or that of their parents -- sometimes brought with it eligibility for, o

Remember that Chinese pet food, laced with melamine, that caused kidney failure in the family European pooch? Or the pork and beef from Belgium containing cancer-causing dioxin? The horse meat passed off as beef burgers in Britain? Now tainted Dutch eggs are making diners uneasy.There’s something especially creepy about recurring food scandals, even the ones that don‘t pose a huge threat to public health. The latest, involving millions of eggs sold in 18 countries as far from Dutch chickens as H

Australia’s parliament is in the grip of the world’s most ridiculous constitutional crisis. The situation threatens the country’s democratic process, which is reason enough for politicians and courts to work to unpick it. More importantly, though, it raises questions the rest of the world would do well to ponder.Over the past month, five members of Australia‘s 226-member parliament have admitted that they may have unwittingly held dual citizenship -- a condition that, under Australia’s 1900 cons

Susan Rice, national security advisor to President Barack Obama, recently said the United States could live with a nuclear regime in North Korea but failed to answer an important question. For how long?After all, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, weird of appearance, weird of mind and downright murderous when it comes to eliminating fellow officials and relatives he does not trust, has said he just may wipe out America someday.To kill time until he tried, a bullying, nuclear-endowed North Korea w

In the wake of the events in Charlottesville and the president’s reaction, some activists, including conservatives, are renewing their focus on removing Steve Bannon from the White House. Their reasons are familiar by now: He represents the “nationalist” wing of the administration most closely tied to this weekend’s violence and once bragged that his Breitbart.com was the “platform for the alt-right.” It seems like an easy call, but Maggie Haberman at the New York Times is offering a note of cau

Donald Trump is a narcissistic, short-tempered, uninformed, unpredictable bully. In almost every context, this combination of traits is exactly what you would not want in a president of the United States. But one exception might be in dealing with Kim Jong-un and North Korea.As I tell students in my negotiation class, in hard-nosed, brass-knuckles bargaining, the crazy person wins because he forces a rational counterpart to make concessions in order to avoid mutual disaster. And no one does craz

Briefly, before he went wildly off-script on Tuesday at Trump Tower, we lived in a world where the 45th president of the United States had finally managed to condemn Nazis. And let’s ask ourselves: Did that make us feel any better? Did the sight of Donald J. Trump glumly reading off a teleprompter remarks obviously written by someone else convince anyone that he understood his earlier error? Did we all begin to feel that America and the world were in safe hands?Well, no, of course not.Nobody in

Last week I pulled my attention away from the North Korea crisis -- more on that later -- to consider the memo that got software engineer James Damore fired from Google.Damore was trying to account for the lack of gender diversity at Google, whose tech employees are 80 percent male. He admits the existence of broad cultural biases, but he got in trouble for attributing some of the gender imbalance to essential genetic differences between males and females.While Damore concedes many exceptions an