Well, maybe met is too strong a word. My boyfriend M. and I walked into a crowded party and I caught a glimpse of her across the room, clutching the green neck of a Heineken and laughing at a joke I could not hear. I pivoted on my toes, walked the other way, and spent the rest of the night keeping her in my peripheral vision while avoiding eye contact.

So how did I know it was her? How does anyone these days recognize a person they’ve never met? Facebook, of course.

But I hadn’t just caught a glimpse of this girl in one of M.’s profile pictures, or seen a grainy icon next to a message on someone’s wall. Over the past several weeks, I had scoured every photo on her profile, hundreds of them, desperately hoping to read into them some explanation for what had happened.

Oh, and what happened was this: I had stolen her boyfriend.

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I don't know what I expected when maman demanded earlier that morning, "Come with me to buy some meat," but it definitely wasn't this. In fact, if I were to write a memoir of the four months I spent as a student in Senegal, I would probably call it, "I Don't Know What I Was Expecting, but It Wasn't This: The Ryan Brown Story." Every moment, especially in the early days, was rife with opportunities for bewilderment. I would get into a taxi, only to have the driver stop along the way to pick up his friend -- and then drive him home first. Or I would respond to a man's "hello" on the street and he would shoot back, "Je pense que je t'aime." I think I love you. Apparently the concept of "Africa time" doesn't apply to matters of the heart.

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We've assembled a slide show of some of the most extraordinary photos of floods, fires and other weather disturbances. We also spoke with Heidi Cullen, scientist and author of the newly released book, "The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet" to find out what they mean.

We’ve obviously had a couple crazy months of weather globally. But are all those events just normal weather variations, or does this signal something broader about the health of the planet?

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He discovered something unexpected: Living off the grid may be a fringe activity, but it’s not restricted to any one fringe. America’s off-gridders are pot farmers and 9/11 truthers, committed environmentalists who grow their own food and libertarians living out of their cars, old school horse-and-buggy Mennonites and hypermodern owners of "earthships" (eco-conscious houses made of dirt-filled tires). They live in towns, on farms, 100 miles from the reach of another human being. They work -- or don’t. Pay taxes -- or not. But all of them are committed to a simple goal, living without dependence on utility providers.

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Instead, the site — which is meant to serve as the "safe for work" cousin of Playboy.com — reads like College Humor met Maxim at a frat party and then the two of them ran straight out and iced a couple bros. With features like an advice column on "how to hang out with porn chicks" and a video on the memoir-worthy topic "a day in the life of my boobs," The Smoking Jacket is a Playboy alternative you can page through in your cubicle without accidentally stumbling across a naked photo of Kim Kardashian or an interview with public intellectual Cornel West. Because what's more awkward than your boss discovering your interest in the racial undertones of American politics?

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"[The doctor] never asked for my approval, never ran any checks, just mutilated me as if I were a mute animal," Saodat Rakhimbayeva, a 24-year old who was sterilized shortly after the birth of her son in March, told the Associated Press.

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A new report released today by the United Nations Development Fund for Women highlights the pressing demand for female voices in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, and in particular the voices of HIV-positive women. Currently, less than a quarter of the leadership of global AIDS-fighting organizations are female, and only eight percent -- of either gender -- are HIV positive. The culprits of this imbalance, according to the researchers, are pretty much exactly what you'd expect: gender norms, stigma, the heavy burden of responsibility in domestic life and illiteracy.

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So when Joan got an invitation to the newly minted TEDWomen, she wasn't sure whether to be flattered or insulted. Was this the real deal, or some kind of consolation prize? She knew TED's track record -- less than 20 percent of "TED talks," as conference presentations are known, have been given by women, and of the speakers at this year's conference, only 17 of 57 will be. Why create a new female-focused conference, Joan wondered, rather than just integrate more women into the program of TED itself?

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The study, which has been conducted every five years since 1989, analyzed not only the amount of coverage that women's sports received, but also the type. Using three two-week blocks in 2009 -- one each in March, July and November -- it found that not a single episode of SportsCenter or network sports news shows led with a story about women's sports. And the pieces that did focus on female athletes tended toward the "female soccer player pulls teammate's hair" genre of coverage rather than the "hey, look at this amazing athletic performance" ilk. The obvious reaction to this kind of study is to argue, well, of course ESPN doesn't focus on women's sports. After all, it's a business, not a gender equity nonprofit, and the sports that sell big in this country overwhelmingly star men. Why might that be?

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By a landslide vote of 336 to 1, the lower house of the French Parliament approved a ban today on the full head-and-body veil in public spaces, capping off more than a year of contentious debate on the issue. In a strange and fittingly French twist, however, some 200 liberal M.P.s walked out and abstained from casting a ballot at all -- so as best to demonstrate their opposition to both the nature of the ban and the burqa itself. The lone dissenting vote came from a conservative M.P. named Daniel Garrigue, who told a reporter for the French paper Le Monde, "in fighting extremist behavior, we risk sliding towards a totalitarian society."

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On this side of the Atlantic, however, conversations about European burqa bans have fractured more predictably along political lines. You would be hard pressed to find an American feminist clamoring to see the burqa outlawed, and that perspective has certainly been absent from Broadsheet -- until now. Ahead of parliament's vote on Tuesday, we went to Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born journalist who calls herself "a liberal, a Muslim and a feminist," to better understand the argument for a ban.

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Buss and his team of psychologists surveyed over 800 women and found that women ages 27 to 45 were more likely than either their highly fertile younger sisters (ages 18 to 26) or the menopausal set (over 46) to "have frequent sexual fantasies," "think about sexual activity," or display "a willingness to have casual sex." And from an evolutionary biology standpoint, the researchers argue, that makes sense -- in order to propagate the species, women with declining fertility recognize, consciously or otherwise, that if they want to have children, well, they'd better snap to it. In other words, when your biological clock says jump, you better, uh, run off and have lots of sex.

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Google isn't the first company to cough up the cash for the tax, which amounts to a yearly average of $1069 per couple, but it's a rare practice, even among employers that offer partner benefits. I have to say, this is a savvy strategic move for the web giant, which competes with a sea of other benefit-heavy Silicone Valley companies for its talent. And, as experts note, when Google makes a statement like this, other companies are likely to follow. "When you have a high-profile company doing anything, that tends to get into the mind of the culture, and it can have a more diffuse effect," one health consultant told the Times.

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Now there’s a question I never thought I’d have to ask. Call me crazy, but I’d put people who batter their family members right up there with the mentally ill and Dick Cheney on the list of people who should never, ever be allowed near a gun. And Congress agrees; that's why in 1996 it passed a law that barred anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from transporting, owning or using a gun in this country.

But that may be about to change. In a contentious 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that state and local governments cannot enact bans on firearm ownership, and legal experts predict that the ruling will bring a flood of challenges to existing gun control laws -- including those that prohibit batterers from owning firearms.

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The bizarre wordless attack, which provoked Halimi to lunge back at her assailant, occurred in full view of dozens of witnesses. Her crime? Apparently last year Halimi, who writes for the Algerian sports daily Competition, published a translation of an interview Saifi did with an Arabic paper in Qatar, revealing his engagement to a French woman.

Yeah, Algeria and France have a sensitive relationship (colonialism will do that to you), and yeah, Saifi was probably trying to keep that information on the down low, but it should go without saying that it is completely unacceptable for a player to strike a journalist -- period. Full stop. Especially when her "offense" was to publish information that he had already made publicly available through another media outlet.

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To anyone who has ever missed a pill because she couldn't get to the pharmacy in time, or for women whose access to a doctor is sporadic or nonexistent, this is exactly the kind of holy-shit-why-did-no-one-think-of-this-before idea that we've been waiting for. As Blanchard points out, 50 years of use has proved that hormonal birth control meets the standards for OTC distribution: you don't really require a doctor's expertise to tell you if you need the pill (are you sexually active? Do you not want a baby? Check, check), you can't become addicted, the side effects are mild and even the most severe are less dangerous than those of some medications already available over the counter.

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