Los Angeles Times-Washington Post

The usually potty-mouthed Sarah Silverman has taken on the role of Vanellope Von Schweetz in Disney's Wreck-It Ralph. Has the animation giant got it wrong? asks Roger Moore.

Strange things are happening in Appalachia. The natural world as we know it is coming to an end, overheated by human greed.

Taylor Swift makes a grown-up move on Red, writes Randy Lewis, of the Los Angeles Times.

We really do live in a universe without purpose, writes Lawrence M. Krauss.

She may be 86 and suffering from dementia, but former prime minister Margaret Thatcher is still having a divisive effect on Britain, thanks to a new film about her life, as Henry Chu reports.

The all-male Republican presidential campaign has a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, Robert M. Sapolsky, hot on the trail of some "monkey business" not usually associated with the hotbed of politics.

The first 10 minutes or so of the epic fantasy series Game of Thrones are spent celebrating the glories of cable television - bloody violence (beheadings, hacked off body parts, eviscerated guts steaming in the snow) and sex (female semi-frontal nudity, non-missionary position intercourse and unnecessarily graphic sound effects.)

Amid all the talk of gloom and doom in the United States, with the stock market's near crash and the renewed threat of a double-dip recession, it is worth pausing to remember the US remains the greatest country on Earth. It is also the country with the most promising future.

The only sort of power a news organisation can wield safely is the power to persuade.