Slate

After recent revelations of NSA spying, it’s difficult to trust large Internet corporations like Facebook to host our online social networks. Facebook is one of nine companies tied to PRISM--perhaps the largest government surveillance effort in world history. Even before this story broke, many social media addicts had lost trust in the company. Maybe now they’ll finally start thinking seriously about leaving the social network giant.

WASHINGTON — What’s wrong with the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program? The answer, according to civil libertarians, is its scope. Edward Snowden, the ex-NSA contractor who exposed the program, calls it “omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance.” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the story, accuses the U.S. government of “collecting the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing . . . monitoring them, keeping dossiers on them.” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., says the feds are “trolling through billions of phone records.”

WASHINGTON — With her appointment as national security adviser, Susan Rice stands to become the most important figure on President Obama’s foreign-policy team — except for Obama himself.

WASHINGTON — All over the world, scientists are experimenting on soldiers to keep them awake beyond the limits of normal endurance. Researchers are engineering, and militaries are deploying, chemically enhanced troops. Of all the superpowers we’ve imagined, the one that has turned out to be most attainable — so attainable we’re already using it — is the ability to go without sleep.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — As Apple CEO Tim Cook deftly parried attacks on his company for avoiding paying billions in taxes before Congress Tuesday, we could be forgiven for heaving a collective sigh, part resignation and part resentment. Of course the big fish get away with tax shenanigans that the rest of us don’t. It’s one more reason to hate the IRS, after the agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups for intrusive questioning.

LOS ANGELES — It happened for the first time a couple of years ago when I turned on the television and stumbled upon a nondescript sitcom on network TV. The actress, who appeared to be in her late 40’s, was playing the television mother of an actor who looked to be in his early 40’s.

I was confused when I heard the actor refer to her as “mom,” but then I realized that it was just another example of Hollywood’s insane ageism, particularly directed towards women — even actresses playing mothers to 40-year olds can’t be over 50. To continue watching, I somehow needed to reconcile that the “mother” had to be roughly 8 years old when she gave birth to her “son.” And I couldn’t, so I turned the TV off.

In 2004, psychic Sylvia Browne went on national television and told Amanda Berry’s mother that her daughter was dead. Now that Berry has turned up alive after 10 years in captivity, Browne is facing calls to stop offering her services to victims’ families and detectives.

Are psychics ever actually useful in missing persons investigations?

No. Academics have repeatedly tested the abilities of psychics to provide any useful information in a crime investigation, and the results are damning. A British study published in 1996, for example, pitted self-proclaimed psychics against undergraduate psychology students. Each participant was handed an item that was involved in a solved crime, such as a scarf or a shoe, and the subjects simply uttered whatever notions popped into their minds. They were also given a list of statements about the crimes, only some of which were true. The psychics were no better than the students at making predictions, and neither group performed better than chance. Those results have been replicated in dozens of studies.