The Verge Gerontocracy and the fall of nations. The graying of America's leadership goes hand in hand with a failure to care about future generations.
Historic Painting: "Le Tache Noire" (The Black Spot) by Albert Bettannier, 1887. This painting is a masterwork of light, emotion and human expression, but it also contains an explicitly political message.
Deadly poker game: The moral gamble of the Lusitania. The Lusitania disaster was a terrible collision of chutzpah on one side and naïvete on the other.