Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday that he’s trying to broker asylum in Iceland for Edward Snowden, the leaker who provided The Guardian and The Washington Post with top-secret documents he obtained as a contractor at the National Security Agency.

On a conference call with reporters, Assange was joined by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, and James Goodale, the paper’s general counsel at the time.

There will be a lot of these heartsick tributes to Michael Hastings, who died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the unforgivably young age of 33.

He was one of the great journalists of our generation, possessing spark and insight and righteous indignation. But he was also funny and kind and irreverent. He took his work seriously but never himself.

THE U.S. military may have to clean out its closet. After a decade of proliferating camouflage designs—pixelated patterns, flowing color splotches, and even tiny globes and anchors—to distinguish one branch from another, Congress appears to have had enough.

Last Friday the House approved a measure that would require all branches of the military to share the same camouflage pattern by October 2018, and the Senate Armed Services Committee has approved a similar provision. Rep. William Enyart (D–Illinois) was inspired to put the measure forward after reading a Washington Post report last month that branches of the military have spent millions designing their own subtly unique fatigues. In the last 11 years the military has gone from two camo patterns—one for forest, the other for desert—to 10.

The Marine Corps started the sartorial arms race in 2000, when it spent $319,000 to develop a pixelated camo in woodland and desert palettes. The pixels were cool, modern, and reminiscent of digital technology, and other branches wanted the print, but couldn’t have it, because the Marines, anticipating copycats, had emblazoned tiny eagles, globes, and anchors onto their uniform. So the Army spent $3.2 million developing its own pixelated pattern, which was released in 2005 and was supposed to work in all environments, from forests to cities to deserts. It turned out that it didn’t blend in with the Afghan landscape, so they rushed to replace it again in 2010 with a more traditional splotchy pattern called MultiCam.

The FBI has little choice but to excavate the field in suburban Detroit where an octogenarian former mob boss says Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

The agents cannot just ignore the tip, so dig they must, even if it means putting money into the pocket of the aging hood who is apparently the first of his ilk to seek a score by self-publishing online.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest plan for the Big Apple is landing with a splatter in the lap of New York’s landlords and superintendents.

Fresh off his fight to limit the size of soft drinks and introducing bike sharing, Bloomberg is taking aim at dinner plates, requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste from their regular trash for composting. Residents will be asked to save chicken bones, rotting fruit, and stale bread in special containers in their homes, which they’ll have to deposit in larger curbside bins that will be emptied weekly by sanitation trucks.

IT TOOK a while for Dong-Ping Wong, a New York City architect—whose firm has designed buildings, a Dallas housing block, and a pedestrian bridge in Slovenia—to see New York City’s East River as more than just a border that snakes between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

It’s water.

But once you make that realization, explains Wong, who grew up on the beach in San Diego, it’s really just a short leap to wonder, “Why can’t we swim in it?”

There is an easy way to meet Joe Jones, and a hard way. Let’s start with the easy way. If you and I were at a cocktail party, I’d introduce you to a tall, bald, black man, standing a shoulder above most everybody else. Knowing Joe Jones, he’d probably be wearing a tan suit and muted tie. Joe’s subdued, square-rimmed glasses fit nicely with his veiled intellect—he’s the kind of guy who readily drops six-dollar words without a hint of pretense.

I’d probably ask Joe to tell you about the nonprofit he runs, the Center for Urban Families on Baltimore’s West Side. CFUF is a national model for helping men and women who are confronting addiction, poverty, and despair turn their lives around, and teaching absent fathers how to reconnect with their kids. Joe’s a modest guy, so I’d have to brag on his behalf, about the bigwigs who have dropped by his center, and all the awards the organization has won.

Finally, I’d say in passing: “You know, Joe has a powerful personal story himself. His own father wasn’t around, he struggled in the streets for a while, and then pulled himself up, and made it out.” Nice and neat. Joe would nod and smile. You’d nod and smile. I’d nod and smile. We’d all be smiling—appropriately inspired.

The widespread misuse of Adderall and other ADHD medication on New York’s college campuses has come to the attention of the state’s senior U.S. senator—and Chuck Schumer wants a crackdown. Pointing to studies suggesting that up to 35 percent of college and university students use prescription stimulants to study, Schumer said Sunday that “using Adderall as a study drug is academic doping.”

The senator is just the latest public figure to decry student use of so-called study drugs without a formal diagnosis. Several schools across the country have implemented policy changes similar to those Schumer is proposing, such as requiring students to provide detailed medical and educational histories and sign contracts promising not to abuse or sell their medication to obtain a diagnosis from their campus health center. But Schumer’s initiative, which he’s described as “a matter of student health, safety, and academic integrity,” raises questions about whether a drug that will always have a legitimate use for some can ever be controlled.

A revolution is stirring in America. Like all great revolutions, this one starts with a simple but profound truth: Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the United States. Our nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas sit on only 12 percent of the nation’s land mass but are home to two thirds of our population and generate 75 percent of our national GDP. Metros dominate because they embody concentration and agglomeration—networks of innovative firms, talented workers, risk-taking entrepreneurs, and supportive institutions and associations that cluster together in metropolitan areas and coproduce economic performance and progress. There is, in essence, no American (or Chinese or German or Brazilian) economy; rather, a national economy is a network of metropolitan economies.

Cities and metropolitan areas are also on the frontlines of America’s demographic change. America’s population—and its workforce—will be much more diverse in the future than at present, and soon no single race or ethnic group will be the nation’s majority. Many of our metros are already living that future. In fact, every major demographic trend that the United States is experiencing—rapid growth, increasing diversity, an aging demographic—is happening at a faster pace, a greater scale, and a higher level of intensity in our major metropolitan areas.

Peter King is not one to sugarcoat his message. The two-decade veteran of the House of Representatives wears his Fighting Irish bona fides with pride. In his office, the walls are lined like a Queens pizzeria with photos of King and various political celebrities, a Notre Dame rug covers the floor, and a basketball backstop emblazoned with his alma mater’s dukes-up leprechaun mascot hangs in the corner. So when families of some of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting paid the New York Republican a visit this week, he did not shy away from telling them how hard it would be to round up House support for a bipartisan bill he is sponsoring to enhance background checks: “Hate to say it, but I haven’t heard the issue come up since December.”

And yet, Nicole Hockley, Francine Wheeler, Mark Barden, Neil Heslin, Nelba Marquez-Greene, and Bill Sherlach, huddled in chairs around the Notre Dame carpet, didn’t flinch. They have heard this many times in the six months since Adam Lanza blasted his way into the school in Newtown, Connecticut, and cut short the lives of 20 children and six educators—including their beloved sons, daughter, and spouse. As King headed to the floor for a vote, he warned that the furor over the surveillance of telephone and Internet data would further fuel the mistrust of government that stymied a Senate bill on background checks in April. In unison, Hockley, Wheeler, and Barden reassured him: “We aren’t going away.”