“Coraline” is a bad movie for children and a disturbing movie for adults. The horror of it comes not from the plot, which is common, but from its nihilistic attitude. This view sees human relations as power struggles which can only be resolved by an exercise of will, and it sees life as an existential wasteland that has no intrinsic meaning, but what we can give to it ourselves. As art, it is a diminished thing without light, while its truest love is of the darkness in all things. Some people may be misled by the bright tone of the voices in its real world to think it is an “uplifting” movie, but underlying that tone is a spiritual emptiness which inhabits the characters, the setting, and, it seems, the movie's creators.

It was a nightmare scenario: A scientist accidentally pricked her finger with a needle used to inject the deadly Ebola virus into lab mice. Within hours, members of a tightly bound, yet far-flung community of virologists, biologists and others were tensely gathered in a trans-Atlantic telephone conference trying to map out a way to save her life.

This happens to be two days after my older son's 21st birthday, which we marked behind two sets of locked steel doors. I'm exhausted and hopeless and vaguely hung over because Andrew, who has autism, also has evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage. It happened no matter how fiercely I loved him or how many therapies I employed.

Across the American West, legal battles over dinosaur fossils are on the rise as amateur prospectors make major finds