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Here, for instance, is a chilling fact about the nineties: In any given week of the decade, there was a 10 percent chance the No.1 song was by Boyz II Men. Add Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Bryan ­Adams, and chances hit 24 percent. Americans spent a quarter of a decade listening to this sort […]

Today it is as hard to keep up with Sir Roger Bannister’s mind as it once was to keep up with his feet. With the offer of tea and biscuits out of the way, Sir Roger, 82, sits down at the table in the living room of his Oxford flat, takes up his pencil and […]

A white cross rising above the Macacos slum marks the spot where people are burned alive. A starving horse, his ribs poking out, is hitched close by with a thin rope. A nearby soccer field is dotted with pieces of melted rubber. No games are played here. The Amigos dos Amigos gang that runs this […]

Olympic hero (and 2011 “Biggest Loser” contestant) Rulon Gardner has fallen off trucks, tumbled off tractors, and gotten stuck in a baler. He has been impaled on an arrow, broken his neck, and gashed his knee clean to the bone. He has survived several catastrophic high-speed accidents, endured a frostbitten night in subzero temperatures, and […]

Neal Wu’s last chance for international glory, and maybe America’s, too, begins with a sound like a hippo crunching through a field of dry leaves—the sound of 315 computer prodigies at 315 workstations ripping into 315 gray envelopes in unison. “You have five hours,” a voice booms across the packed gymnasium. “Good luck.”

During the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, I worked as a speed typist for the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda. It was my job to type, in English, everything that was said during an endless blur of press conferences where the Middle Kingdom celebrated its logistical triumphs.

Veronica Noone has joined the legion of people, from Olympic-level athletes to ordinary folks just hoping to lower their blood pressure, who are plugging into a data-driven revolution. And it goes way beyond Nike+. Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about […]

As a gawky teenager in the 1960s, Dick Fosbury just wanted to find something he was really good at. Little did he know he would become an Olympic champion and turn a sport literally upside down.

On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the Web looked […]

She has been stripped of her Olympic medals. She has been jailed. Now she is trying to become the WNBA’s oldest rookie.