For the past 10 months, Donald Trump has been a political enigma. Against the predictions of journalists, policy wonks and odds makers, a tabloid darling with no political experience and few coherent policies is now poised to be the Republican nominee for president.

Hundreds of journalists and political scientists have tried to explain...

Donald Trump is the Republican establishment’s worst nightmare, but the GOP leadership can’t find a way to stop him.

Tuesday night provided the latest example. The New York billionaire swept all five of the GOP primaries, winning Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

Trump’s victory margins were...

This week our collaborators at the PBS debate show Point Taken focus on the cost of university tuition: is it worth it?

Writing for The Conversation, Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University argues that it is – and not just to individual students but also to the states and communities in which they live. His question is:...

In case you’ve forgotten the section on the food web from high school biology, here’s a quick refresher.

Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). Plants use available sunlight to convert water from the soil and...

A recent report by The Education Trust, a nonprofit working on educational justice, reveals that while there has been an improvement in graduation rates at four-year public institutions for all students, the improvement is smaller for black students.

According to the report, the gaps in graduation rates between black and white students have either...

Even though most people don’t know much about chemicals in general or poisons in particular, virtually everyone knows that arsenic is bad. In the first century, arsenic was already known to be a deadly poison . However, it was the Borgias in the 14th and 15th centuries who perfected...

This week marks the centennial of the Easter Rising – the armed insurrection that would trigger nationalist Ireland’s final battle for independence from Great Britain.

The first of July will mark another centennial, that of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, in which over 3,500 Irish soldiers were...

Luis is an upper-middle-class American-born Latino.

When I interviewed him in 2008, he told me he had spent long hours, and a substantial amount of money, restoring a classic Chevy truck. One day, clad in grease-stained work clothes, Luis decided to take the truck for a test drive around his affluent neighborhood. As he cruised past his neighbors'...

Last Thursday, the world was shocked by the untimely death of Prince, the highly prolific, Grammy-winning music icon who not only transformed music and the record industry but also provoked questions about race, gender and sexuality.

Apart from his songs, musical genius and virtuosic skills, the “Purple Rain” singer is also widely...

The largest nuclear disaster in history occurred 30 years ago at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what was then the Soviet Union. The meltdown, explosions and nuclear fire that burned for 10 days injected enormous quantities of radioactivity into the atmosphere and contaminated vast areas of Europe and Eurasia. The International Atomic Energy...