In this year’s unorthodox presidential election season, the latest campaign foibles can sometimes obscure the unprecedented fact that one major-party candidate for highest office in the United States is a woman. In a country where women have held the right to vote since 1920, it would be a major step to join the approximately 50 percent of...

Pregnant women, like everyone, get sick. And like everyone else, their bodies try to fight infection and, importantly, keep it from reaching the growing fetus.

If the mother’s immune system successfully defeats the virus before the developing baby is exposed or if the virus never crosses the placenta, is harm averted?

Counterintuitively, this...

African-American rights in Baltimore have always been in jeopardy. The recently released report from the Department of Justice on the Baltimore Police Department is sobering, but not surprising.

As a scholar of early African-American history in Maryland, I see similarities between laws regarding enslaved and free blacks living in Baltimore prior to...

If you have children, you are likely to worry about their safety – you show them safe places in your neighborhood and you teach them to watch out for lurking dangers.

But you may not be aware of some online dangers to which they are...

Amazon recently began to offer same-day delivery in selected metropolitan areas. This may be good for many customers, but the rollout shows how computerized decision-making can also deliver a strong dose of discrimination.

Sensibly, the company began its service in areas...

Today we offer two expert perspectives on subsidizing nuclear power. Here’s the argument for ongoing support.

In one of the courses I teach at Penn State, we discuss the...

Today we offer two expert perspectives on subsidizing nuclear power. Here’s the argument against providing economic support.

Since the 1950s, U.S. nuclear power has commanded immense taxpayer and customer subsidy based on promises of economic and environmental benefits. Many of...

Over the past several years, the sports media have presented several stories of youth athletes who have become addicted to prescription painkillers and eventually turned to heroin. If fact, one of these reports in Sports Illustrated was ominously titled “How...

As of Aug. 1, 2016, a new law allows concealed handguns in college and university buildings in Texas.

It’s already had an impact on me as professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks to this law, I set foot in a federal court building...

Few employees would deny that ingratiation is ubiquitous in the workplace.

This behavior goes by many names – kissing up, sucking up, brown-nosing and ass-kissing. Indeed, the fact that there are so many names that describe this behavior suggests that it’s something that goes on all the time...