Free Republic

The term "midlife crisis" was coined by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965. The English language somehow made do without that phrase for the previous six hundred years, yet today, could we get along without it? In 1900, the average American male life expectancy was 47. In 1965, it was 67. An additional two decades of existence: More time to ruminate about your time running out. In this as in so many instances, art preceded (social) science: The then-nameless male midlife crisis had been explored before, through farce (1955's The Seven Year Itch), then high-brow literature (John Cheever's classic 1964 story...

Richard Anderson, the Emmy-nominated actor who played Oscar Goldman in both hit 1970s series “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman,” died August 31. He was 91. Anderson’s credits spanned more than 180 film and TV roles over six decades after starting his Hollywood career as a messenger at MGM. But he will be best remembered for playing Goldman, the handler of the bionic duo played by Lee Majors and Lyndsay Wagner. Combined, the series ran for 150 episodes and several TV movies — two of which Anderson produced.

On Wednesday Governor Cuomo’s New York Wage Board set a new minimum wage for New York City’s 200,000 fast food workers. City establishments will now be required to offer employees at least $15 per hour by the end of 2018. The move also makes it cost effective for companies to fire humans and hire robots. Momentum Machines has developed a robot that can put out one burger every 10 seconds.

When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn't always work--if bleeding hasn't stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and start over again. It’s so painful, “you take the guy’s gun away first,” says former U.S. Army Special Operations medic John Steinbaugh. Even with this emergency treatment, many soldiers...

The transition from June to July will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone's control. Time will stand still for one second on Saturday evening (June 30) because a "leap second" will be added to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks. International Atomic Time is a very accurate and stable time scale. It is a weighted average of the time kept by about 200 atomic clocks in over 50 national laboratories worldwide. Atomic time is measured through vibrations of atoms in a metal isotope that resembles mercury and can keep time to within a tenth of a billionth...

A Stafford County teenager is paying a stiff price for spitting into a customer's drink at a fast-food restaurant last month. Shaleesheya G. Ford, 18, was ordered to serve six months in jail after pleading guilty to three misdemeanors Thursday in Stafford General District Court. Ford, a high school junior, was also ordered to not work in the food industry for three years and to stay off all Taco Bell properties statewide for the same period. Ford pleaded guilty to assault and battery, obstruction of justice and filing a false police report. She was taken to the Rappahannock Regional Jail...

<p>HOUSTON - New information from 32 seconds of garbled data show that shuttle Columbia's flight control system was still trying to guide the orbiter even after NASA lost contact with the ship, the agency said Saturday.</p> <p>NASA has been working feverishly to resurrect information from the data, which Columbia continued to transmit after Mission Control lost contact with the seven-member crew on Feb. 1.</p>