Visit any preschool classroom during free play and you will likely see a child pretending to be someone else. Make-believe play is a ubiquitous part of early childhood. And beyond being fun for kids, pretending and other kinds of imaginative play are also believed by some to be critical to healthy...

Bernie Sanders is on a roll.

He has won six of the last seven Democratic nominating contests, including an impressive victory over Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday. He outraised Clinton by US$15 million in March and trails her by only one percentage point in the most recent national poll of Democratic primary voters.

As the...

The news is currently filled with stories of corruption.

A global group of media outlets just broke the story of secret offshore bank accounts in Panama, which suggests widespread corruption in the Russian government and elsewhere. For months, stories of the Brazilian government’s bribery scandal have filled the news. Other headline-grabbing...

Last week, President Obama criticized journalists covering the election for “the practice of drawing ‘false equivalences’ between competing claims made by politicians.”

“If I say the world is round and someone else says it’s flat, that’s worth reporting,” he said. “But you might also want to...

Drones – and promises about drones – seem ubiquitous these days. And some of what we associate with drones comes with varying degrees of scariness.

We think of automated planes shooting missiles, drones flying near sensitive nuclear power plants or quadcopters crashing into crowds while filming. If we think about everyday possibilities,...

On February 16, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the ASTRO-H satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The space telescope named Hitomi – “pupil” in Japanese – carried with it the hopes and dreams of astrophysicists from around the world.

Hito...

States have traditionally provided funding for public colleges and universities based on a combination of the number of students enrolled and how much money they were allocated previously.

But, in the face of increasingly tight budgets and pressures to demonstrate...

This week The Conversation US kicks off a collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH TV that debates a topic that Americans care about – without the shouting.

Up for discussion on Tuesday at 11 PM Eastern/10 PM Central on PBS and at pbs.org is the health of the American Dream. Is it dead or alive?

University of Texas...

The news is currently filled with stories of corruption.

A global group of media outlets just broke the story of secret offshore bank accounts in Panama, which suggests widespread corruption in the Russian government and elsewhere. For months, stories of the Brazilian government’s bribery scandal have filled the news. Other headline-grabbing...

A persistent question raised in this presidential election cycle is whether assumptions about American politics need to be rewritten, especially those related to money.

The rise of self-funded Donald Trump and small-donor-supported Senator Bernie Sanders has led some to argue that we should worry much less about the...