In the fall, Catholics and some other Christian churches celebrate the Feast of the Holy Cross. With the feast, Christians commemorate Jesus Christ’s life, especially his salvific death on the cross and his later...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Why do old people hate new music? – Holly L., age 14, Belmont, Mass.

When I was a...

Editor’s note: Private prisons have long stirred controversy, most recently over their role in housing undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. Several states have banned them, several banks have vowed to stop financing them and...

Fires in the Brazilian Amazon have outraged the world. But what can people living far from the world’s largest rainforest do to save it?

California thinks it has an answer.

On Sept. 19, the California Air...

George Washington, hero of the American Revolution and the country’s first president, in 1796 withheld documents the House of Representatives had requested from him regarding treaty negotiations with France.

Washington thought that giving the House papers respecting a negotiation with a foreign power would be to establish a dangerous...

The U.N.‘s climate panel report released Sept. 25 makes crystal clear that the planet’s oceans, snow and ice are in dire trouble and the damage is causing harm to the people who depend on them. Even with aggressive efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions, many nations will struggle to adapt.

All people on Earth depend on the ocean...

Two trends have defined the past decade and both have been on display at this year’s session of the United Nations General Assembly.

One has been the escalating effects of climate change, which were the focus of the...

My most vivid adolescent memories of the Jewish High Holy Days are the painful rumbling of my empty stomach as I fasted on Yom Kippur, and the sharp blasts of the shofar – the ram’s horn – sounding from the synagogue pulpit.

I...

It has somehow become sort of normal to use the workplace to protest social issues unrelated to the job itself. This was something almost unheard of even five years ago.

The latest example came on Sept. 20 as more than 1,000 Amazon employees staged...

Zambia, a country in southeast Africa, has approximately 1,200 lions, one of the largest lion populations on the continent. More than 40% of the U-shaped country is protected land, with over 120,000 square miles of national parks, sanctuaries and game management areas for lions to roam.