From The Civil War to Jazz, Ken Burns’s sweeping documentary series have brought American history to life for millions of viewers. His signature style is so well known that Apple’s iMovie has a function — a slow zoom on a still image — called “the Ken Burns effect.”

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that Tim Duncan has been the most successful NBA player of his generation, but then why doesn’t he command the attention that many of his fellow players do?

The six-year-old microblogging site came into its own this presidential cycle, but the past few weeks have demonstrated how clearly it has become the tool of choice for getting something into the political bloodstream, from manufacturing a battle over who can be called a working mom to building a movement around a piece of legislation.

This week, Apple reported that its quarterly profit nearly doubled, in large part thanks to continued brisk sales of iPhones. The company sold 35.1 million iPhones in the first quarter, up from 18.65 million a year ago. But love affairs with inanimate objects don’t last forever, marketers say. SUVs and the rise and fall of the BlackBerrry, to name but two.

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney mention the strong women in their lives every chance they get. And each claims that the other candidate is bad for women — with Democrats talking up the Republican “war on women’’ and the GOP countering that the real casualties are the women who’ve lost their jobs since Obama became president. But female voters are so diverse that there could never be one straightforward answer to what women want.

The president was more somber than in our past interviews – and less inclined to depart from the handful of themes he had been concentrating on in recent weeks. He avoided discussing Mitt Romney, even when asked a direct question, and focused primarily on the very real constraints he operates under as president, from the intransigence of Congress to the dilemma of America’s anti-drug laws.

If you think Mitt Romney is too mild, too “golly gee,” too Mormon, to survive the shark tank of a modern presidential campaign, his answer is Eric Fehrnstrom. He’s Mitt’s most trusted adviser and the guy whom Romney turns to when someone’s leg needs breaking. (Figuratively, of course.) If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then Fehrnstrom gives his boss what he most dearly needs—a backbone.

Almost any way you slice it, Rick Santorum’s electoral destiny lies in the Land of Lincoln. If he has any hope of making a realistic run at Mitt Romney, he needs to win the Illinois primary.

As users, we move through our Internet experiences unaware of the churning subterranean machines powering our web pages with their cookies and pixels trackers, their tracking code and databases. We shop for wedding caterers and suddenly see ring ads appear on random web pages we’re visiting. We sometimes think the ads following us around the Internet are “creepy.” We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don’t really know what to think.

Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.

Skye Jethani talks with Rob Bell about work, mission, and why some Christians throw “crap” parties.

For years scientists have been able to change the emotional tone of a memory by administering certain drugs just before asking people to recall the event in detail. New research suggests that they’ll be able to target and erase specific memories altogether.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle. At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964 … The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period … When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election … the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.

I think there is a good chance a Third Party will try to fill the space between the really “severely conservative” Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama. It would be fitting. After all, this is the 20th anniversary of Ross Perot’s independent candidacy. Perot won close to 20 percent of the vote, and his success was instrumental in making deficit reduction one of Bill Clinton’s top priorities.

From this point of view, Pinterest is a treasure. It’s a chance to see American culture as if from a glass-bottom boat. Yes, some of it is a little reductive. But sometimes what people stuff into the categories is a chance for us to see exactly what they mean. Pinterest is a little Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalencies.

Slowly but surely, Ron Paul is raking in convention delegates and building leverage — enough to command respect for his agenda and possibly, a top aide suggested Wednesday, enough to land a spot on the GOP ticket for his son, a freshman Kentucky senator and tea party darling.