Contributing editor Terry Krautwurst explains how you can learn basic tree identification skills, including recommendations for where to find classes and how to select a field guide.

I first heard about square foot gardening a few years ago from a friend who swore by it. Looking at his garden, I could see why: he had a bounty of chiles and tomatoes to make any salsa enthusiast drool. At the time, I was unaware that there was a boo…

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) [...]

Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when [...]

Had Flint actually shot the gun, he would presumably have been entitled to have the jury consider his defense-of-others defense. (Such a defense would generally be roughly similar to a self-defense defense, and use of deadly force is generally allowed in self-defense against sufficiently serious threats.) But because Flint merely brandished the gun, he’s a [...]