Sitting quietly in the corner, we watch a daily family ritual: in the living room awash with soft afternoon light, a six-year-old boy is sitting on the floor, controller in hand, eyes firmly on the television screen. His fingers expertly...

Fully 92 percent of American teenagers go online daily. More than half of them do so several times a day and a quarter are online “almost constantly.”

I’m a mother of two teenagers who fall into that latter category. And as a parent and a teacher educator, I work on ways...

Everyone loves a good story, but can a good story lead to love?

Storytelling is a fundamental form of communication, and research has demonstrated the power of narratives to change minds and influence behavior.

For example, personal narratives are often used in advertising and health campaigns, and have led to an incre...

“Cure” is a word that’s dominated the rhetoric in the war on cancer for decades. But it’s a word that medical professionals tend to avoid. While the American Cancer Society reports that cancer treatment has improved...

“And when she was good, she was very, very good,

But when she was bad she was horrid.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem may have befit Houston’s air around 1999, when the city briefly ranked as the “New U.S. Smog Capital.” Back then, leaks and flares from local...

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) continues to take a tremendous toll on human health, with 37 million people infected and 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2014. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV epidemic has been most devastating, more than 25 million people are HIV-infected, about 70 percent of the global total.

But as of 2014, only about 1...

In Brazil, right-wing parties and politicians are following constitutional procedures to oust the country’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. They claim that she made improper use of budgetary procedures to bolster her 2014 reelection campaign.

The left calls it an illegitimate coup. They believe the ultimate goal is gutting...

One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the American worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

That’s even turned some pro free-trade Republicans into protectionists. As a result, the candidates are promising to bring these jobs...

Philosophy has been a favorite whipping boy in the culture wars since 399 B.C., when an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death. Nowadays, philosophers are no longer accused of “corrupting the youth.” Instead, a surprisingly wide range of pundits, from celebrity scientist...

The Obama Administration issued new rules this week that will allow millions more Americans to qualify for overtime pay.

The Labor Department regulation, which will take effect in December, will double the annual threshold that helps determine who qualifies for overtime when they work more than...