A new report from Pew Research predicts that more folks under 35 will be single forever. Here's why

The glossy view of history has now prompted more than 500 scholars, veterans and activists — including the civil rights leader Julian Bond; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers; Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan; and Peter Yarrow of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary — to join Mr. Hayden in demanding the ability to correct the Pentagon's version of history and a place for the old antiwar activists in the anniversary events.

The rich tapestry Hayton weaves is fascinating in itself, but of signal importance is a thread he carefully pulls from it: China's history-based claim to the sea area south of Hong Kong and Hainan Island is mostly rubbish. The Chinese evidence simply does not stand up against the annals of Vietnam's Nguyen lords, who by 1750 or so were despatching annual expeditions to both the Spratly and Paracel Island groups. The Vietnamese went mainly to salvage shipwrecks, to be sure, but they left behind markers and kept careful records.

Postscript: Bill Hayton, ironically, is not welcome in Vietnam. He was the BBC's resident correspondent in Hanoi in 2007-2008. Evidently his reporting at that time annoyed the authorities. When Hayton applied for a visa to participate in a November 2012 conference on East Sea issues sponsored by the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, he was refused. Some months later, Hayton applied again, specifically asking to interview Vietnamese officials for his forthcoming book. Again he was refused. The result is that Hayton's sections on Vietnam and the East Sea are relatively 'thin' -- they lack the compelling detail that conversations with Vietnamese experts might have supplied. It's a pity -- and another story with (so far) no happy ending!

Pierre Asselin. Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 352 pp. $55 (cloth/e-book).
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen. Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 464 pp. $34.95 (cloth/e-book).

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
by William Deresiewicz
Free Press, 245 pp., $26.00

Bad news emanating from the Ivy League—cheating scandals or grade inflation—has long had a special appeal for American readers. During the financial panic of 1837, Emerson chided Harvard for producing bookworms rather than original thinkers. "The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius," he said in his Phi Beta Kappa address. "They pin me down." Thoreau, a member of the 1837 class, sounded like a Sixties radical when he wrote inWalden that he had "lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors." Melville's Ishmael claimed that a whaling ship was his Harvard and Yale. "Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank," Henry Adams (class of 1858) wrote, adding, more cheerfully, that "it taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile."

An incredible list of the 50 best children's books published from 1950 to the present day that celebrate cultural and ethnic diversity is released today

A new book claims Thailand's elite has long manipulated the monarchy for its own gains, leaving ordinary Thais out in the cold

A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century
by Andrew MacGregor Marshall
Zed Books

While DNA may now be visible, however, it remains more hint than history. Kenneally, a journalist and linguist, shows that just as a gene usually delivers its genetic message only in conversation with an incoming chemical messenger, so our DNA tells its tales most fully only in light of the history of the people who carry and interrogate it. It takes all those threads to get the whole story. And Kenneally wants it all.

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn show you, through many amazing vignettes matched with serious evidence, that you can make a difference to the lives of people trapped in misery. Those lives may be very different from yours, but the people leading them feel much the way you would if you were in their position.

BEIJING — WHEN her village was still lush with lotus plants, and a crystalline river sparkled in the fields, Sheng Keyi, a very clever and very poor 16-year-old girl, watched television on a tiny black-and-white set at a neighbor's house.
It was 1989, and the story that the world knows as the Communist Party's military crackdown in Tiananmen Square was told in reverse on the grainy screen. The official version portrayed the students as violent criminals. The peasants, and the young Ms. Sheng, sitting around the television knew no better.