Characters in 'The Interestings' are that, but lacking much else

You know them, or maybe you're one of them: the type of person for whom the most important thing in the world is to be interesting.

Meg Wolitzer's new novel, The Interestings, is devoted to investigating the species, following a clique of New Yorkers who meet as teens at Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for the arts, in 1974. As they hang out in camp teepees, drinking vodka and Tang and smoking joints, they dream of bright futures as actors, musicians and artists....

PolitiFact explores controversial world of gun statistics

It's a statistic that President Barack Obama and gun control advocates like to repeat again and again: Forty percent of gun purchases are made without background checks.

It's true that purchases at gun shows and via the Internet typically go without background checks. But is it 40 percent? It's difficult for us fact-checkers to say, because it's based on a telephone survey from 1994 — almost 20 years ago....

Review: Rod Dreher's memoir recounts his sister's death from cancer

Louisiana exerts the biggest tug on the hearts of its children, if you believe the U.S. Census. Close to 80 percent of people born there stay there, more than in any other state, according to 2010 numbers.

I can personally vouch for that; Louisiana is the state where I was born. Whenever I get together with fellow Louisiana expats, we inevitably turn to our explanations — our excuses, really — for why we haven't gone home. Then we lament: We miss the food. We miss the music. We miss family....

Buck-O-Meter: At midpoint, Bob Buckhorn has accomplished half his campaign agenda

TAMPA — "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."

Mario Cuomo said it.

Bob Buckhorn is living it.

At the midpoint of his four-year term, Tampa's mayor has kept 17 of his 34 campaign promises, according to the Buck-O-Meter, a project of PolitiFact Florida, the political fact-checking arm of the Tampa Bay Times.

This past year, those promises included finding money to finish the Riverwalk, writing a master plan for downtown development and balancing public order with protester rights at the Republican National Convention....

PolitiFact: How bad will the sequester be, and who is to blame

It's Washington's latest case of economic hostage-taking: If Congress and President Barack Obama don't reach a deal by Friday, the budget gets whacked!

Voters have heard these fiscal threats before. This time, the cuts are part of existing law. Inaction means nearly across-the-board spending cuts, with half taken from defense and the military.

Here's PolitiFact's guide to that funny word, sequestration....

PolitiFact: Fact-checking attacks against Chuck Hagel

Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam veteran, goes before the Senate for confirmation hearings today as President Barack Obama's nominee for defense secretary.

But even before Obama made his choice official, independent spending groups funded by anonymous donors were blasting Hagel. A barrage of TV ads has portrayed him as soft and squishy on Israel, Iran and America's nuclear weapons arsenal....

President Barack Obama kept or moved forward on most campaign promises

Despite a polarized nation and a largely dysfunctional Congress, President Barack Obama has fulfilled or made substantial progress on 73 percent of the 508 promises he made when he ran for president in 2008.

Those results come from PolitiFact's Obameter, an unprecedented four-year effort to rate the president's campaign promises. The ongoing project by the Tampa Bay Times' fact-checking website reveals that Obama has achieved 47 percent of his promises, earning a rating of Promise Kept. Another 26 percent were partially fulfilled, earning a rating of Compromise. ...

FOREIGN FICTION

When Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have discussed foreign policy, there's been lots of accusations and finger-pointing.

Romney accuses Obama of apologizing for America, for being weak against Iran, Russia and China, and not supportive of Israel.

Obama, meanwhile, accuses Romney of incompetence and ignorance and of stoking aggression toward Iran. Obama charges that Romney's approach to foreign policy would "take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly."...