Generation

Chris Paine is a filmmaker whose documentaries include "Who Killed the Electric Car?" ,"Charge" and "Revenge of the Electric Car. " The troubles of electric-car-maker Fisker Automotive have fueled another round of debate about whether plug-ins can live up to their promises. The California start-up, which had already halted production and laid off most of its employees, missed a federal loan payment Monday and told a congressional hearing on Wednesday that bankruptcy may be unavoidable . This is likely the end of the road...

May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Merck & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Roche Holding AG have opened a new front against cancer with the next generation of experimental drugs that use the human immune system to seek and destroy tumor cells. The new therapies have the potential to reap billions of dollars in sales while lengthening patient remissions, said doctors and analysts awaiting study results to be released this week as part of the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting that starts May 31. ...

PHILADELPHIA — Less than an hour before the 8 p.m. tipoff, Philadelphia 76ers employees are scurrying around the Wells Fargo Center, hoping this Saturday night unfolds as planned. It's late March, and the team is handing out Allen Iverson bobblehead dolls. Iverson himself is scheduled to attend, a rare public appearance for the 37-year-old former NBA superstar. He'll be introduced during a pregame ceremony and then watch the game from Sixers chief executive Adam Aron's suite.

Happy Derby weekend, everyone. While I no longer indulge my girlhood horse obsession — in third grade I used to repeatedly check out "Great Racehorses of 1956" from the bowels of the Norfolk city library — I still try to watch the Run for the Roses every year, and of course I always root for one of "our" horses to win. This year's 20-horse Derby field (as of this morning, when I checked) includes 17 steeds who were on the list of 100 potential "studs" in the Week 1016 ...

Shorty needed a ride home. She got confused sometimes, the result of some undefined mental condition, and wasn't always sure where she'd wandered. Her family knew this about Michelle "Shorty" Knight, all 4 feet 7 inches of her, and that's why they worried. She got in a car. It begins there, with that simple act, a 21-year-old — in many ways still very much a girl — got in a car. Aug. 22, 2002. If she'd looked up in that last moment of freedom, she would have seen a...

Simon Speakman Cordall is a British journalist working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Pham Thanh Cong leans forward, his 55-year-old face a patchwork of scars and dents, and explains what's wrong with My Khe hamlet. Vietnamese families are built around a three-generation structure, Cong says. Parents work the fields while grandparents take care of children. In time, children will become caregivers and grandparents the cared-for. Eventually, the generations...

Narcissistic? Maybe not so much. A report in the February issue of Psychological Science refutes a widely publicized 2006 study that found that contemporary youths are measurably more overconfident and egotistical than their predecessors. That view, frequently bolstered by anecdotal evidence, is often blamed on child-rearing practices that have placed a premium on boosting self-esteem. Using scores from a questionnaire known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory completed by 25,000 California college students between 1979 and 2007,...

The July 24 news story "With Indian Politics, the Bad Gets Worse" said that corruption in Indian politics "has carried over since the days of the British Raj. " That is incorrect. The leaders who gave India its independence were, in the Gandhian mold, extremely honest. My mother was a lawmaker in India's Parliament for 20 years, and I had the privilege to see some of these great people firsthand. I once observed Morarji Desai, the finance minister and Gandhian who later became prime minister, spinning thread out of cotton while talking to my mother.

Forget what you may think you know about our newest generation of working women. They are not the fretting, overstressed women we've been reading about for 20 or 30 years. They are as large or larger in number, better-educated, ambitious, optimistic and determined to enjoy a more well-rounded life than their mothers' generations, according to polls from The Washington Post and Pew Research Center. They have high expectations for the quality of their work, moderately high hopes for how much they'll...

FROM EVERY END OF THIS EARTH 13 Families and the New Lives They Made in America By Steven V. Roberts Harper. 323 pp. $25.99 WP BOOKSTORE Steven V. Roberts begins his new book, "From Every End of This Earth," by describing Bao and Tuyen Pham's escape from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. After several failed attempts over six years, they finally ended up on an overcrowded boat that was frequently raided by pirates. Thirteen days later, the Phams and their children...

For years, I've been watching a local garage-rock revival band called the Hall Monitors perform a song called "Opportunity. " They didn't write the song, but whenever they play it, they make sure to point out that it's a Washington song, released in 1964 by a Washington girl group called the Jewels . Hearing the sprightly tune is like getting a little audio window onto long-ago Washington. Then Hall Monitors drummer Mike Sullivan found out that not only were the Jewels still around, they also were still...

DEAR AMY: I am a 27-year-old single mom. I've never been small, but I am a healthy, strong, well-proportioned size 12. My problem is with my mother. She's extremely fat-phobic, and starts to freak out and call herself horrible fat names when she gets over a size 6. She also makes nasty comments about my weight going back to childhood, such as, "I'd kill myself if I had to wear a size 12. " I've learned to accept that. What I can't and won't accept is when she makes fat comments about my daughter.

GENERATIONALS "Heza" Kindred spirits:  The dBs, Massive Attack, Hall & Oates Show:  With Splashh on Thursday at the Rock & Roll Hotel. Show starts at 8:30 p.m. 202-388-7625. www.rockandrollhoteldc.com . $12. Because there are only two Generationals, it makes sense for the New Orleans duo to bulk up its sound with synthesizers. On their two previous albums, singer-guitarists Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer emphasized traditional instruments, and their new release, " Heza ," begins in a...

I read George F. Will's column pretty regularly, and while more often than not I do not agree with his conservative bent, my husband and I were grateful for his April 4 op-ed column, " Reading, writing and white guilt . " The kind of teachers who inspired our generation and the essential three R's that made us well-educated people have been submerged by the idiotic programs Mr. Will described. It is tragic that a generation is being robbed of a proper education by the "featherbedding for administrators of political correctness,"...

Alyssa Cole was in second grade when she received her first Vera Bradley bag: A small pink purse from her grandmother. "And then in fifth grade, I went into a Vera Bradley store for the first time and I fell in love with it," Cole said. Today, the high school freshman has more than 30 bags and wallets by the designer, as well as rugs (one in her bedroom, another in her bathroom), bulletin boards, aprons, picture frames, a bedspread and pillow cases. "If you name it, I probably have it," said...

Daniel Bryan is not what most people would envision when picturing a professional wrestler. He's not a huge man; he's not even a particularly large man. In the bowels of Verizon Center a few hours before a recent taping of WWE's "Monday Night Raw," he stands at equal — or even lesser — height as the various non-grapplers who are milling about. He wears a flannel shirt with baggy jeans, and his full, shaggy beard is the only aspect of his appearance that would make casual...

It's commencement season, often a time to urge graduates to go forth and build a better world. Such pleas may not always work, but the goal remains. A speech given Saturday at ceremonies for Georgetown University's undergraduate school of arts and sciences appeared, at least in part, consistent with that idea. "My generation owes yours an apology, because we definitely shanked it," said David Simon, the author, journalist and creator of the HBO series "The Wire. " Continuing with words from the argot of...

Three days before John F. Kennedy won his first campaign, the 1946 Democratic primary in Boston's 8th District, the enormous Kennedy family threw an enormous party. Eunice, the middlest of the middle children, was the driving force behind the idea: a huge formal reception at the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, with engraved invitations sent to female voters, plans for ballroom dancing, and tuxedos required. The party was the crown jewel after a series of house parties Eunice and Pat had coordinated during the...

Roger Ebert was the smartest man on Twitter. And when the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper where he penned gems as movie critic for nearly half a century, announced his death Thursday afternoon on the social networking site, it included his handle, @ebertchicago . At first, this struck me as odd — ghoulish, even. Why include the Twitter handle of someone who would never be able to respond? But, as many were quick to point out, his Twitter handle was just as much a part of his identity as anything...

Simon Speakman Cordall is a British journalist working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Pham Thanh Cong leans forward, his 55-year-old face a patchwork of scars and dents, and explains what's wrong with My Khe hamlet. Vietnamese families are built around a three-generation structure, Cong says. Parents work the fields while grandparents take care of children. In time, children will become caregivers and grandparents the cared-for. Eventually, the generations will shift and the cycle will...