Coal’s share of the U.S. energy market is rapidly plunging. Low-cost fracking-generated natural gas has overtaken the use of coal at America’s power plants. Impending implementation of the Obama administration’s proposed Clean Power Plan,...

Economic inequality is high and rising. At the same time, many governments are struggling to balance budgets while maintaining spending for popular programs.

That’s prompted some presidential candidates to argue it’s time to raise taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders is leading the charge and would create a new top income tax rate of 54.2...

When was the last time you opened your laptop midconversation or brought your desktop computer to the dinner table? Ridiculous, right? But if you are like a large number of Americans, you have done both with your smartphone.

Less than a decade after the introduction of the...

Having outlasted all his opponents, Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton is closing in on locking up the Democratic nomination.

Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who...

Perhaps you’ve heard of the heavy energy footprint of indoor marijuana farms. But this is just one of a number of surprising and important connections between the energy and drug industries.

Most important, both...

Imagine that a criminal investigator has identified one or more computers that are part of ongoing criminal activity. Unfortunately, the people operating these computers are hiding them. The machines could be anywhere in the world, using anonymous email or to...

Any election demands knowledge, attention and wisdom from the whole electorate. When a campaign season does not seem to be going well, there’s often angst about whether the public has been sufficiently educated.

Anxious eyes turn to our public schools.

For instance,...

On July 27, 1919, Marcus Garvey, the African-American nationalist then nearing the height of his influence, rose to address a crowd of almost 6,000 people who had come to dedicate Liberty Hall, on Harlem’s 138th Street, as the new headquarters of the...

Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH that will next air on Tuesday, May 10 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

The...

Millions of Americans are struggling to pay for college. Nearly 10 million students and their families took out almost US$100 billion in student loans from the federal government in the 2014-15 academic year, pushing outstanding student loan debt to mor...