Some 150 years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you would have to perform it yourself or be in the presence of musicians.

With Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877 came the ability to record music. At that point, the ways that people could...

A recent study by the National Institutes of Health found that more than one in three people in the United States have experienced pain of some sort in the previous three months. Of these, approximately 50 million suffer from chronic or severe pain.

To put these numbers in perspective, 21 million...

Pico Rivera is a dusty working-class Latino suburb of Los Angeles. After the school district, Wal-Mart is the city’s largest employer and the source of 10 percent of its tax revenue. More than 500 families in the town depend on income from the store.

The town is also the epicenter of activism by...

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.

Author and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote these words in 1949, and they are all the more important today.

As we enter the 21st century and today’s children look forward to living in the...

“Unbreakable," M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film, dwells on the theme of human fragility and the search for a human being impervious to injuries that would kill the rest of us. It turns out that this quest is not quite so fanciful as it might first seem. Scientists have identified a small...

As robots become integrated into society more widely, we need to be sure they’ll behave well among us. In 1942, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov attempted to lay out a philosophical and moral framework for ensuring robots serve humanity, and guarding against their...

Every day, millions of people take to search engines with common concerns, such as “How can I lose weight?” or “How can I be productive?” In return, they find articles that offer simple advice and quick solutions,...

For better or worse, many of us never forget high school: the unrequited romantic crushes, chronic embarrassment, desperate struggles for popularity, sexual awakening, parental pressure and, above all else, competition – social, athletic, academic.

T...

When I first served in Brazil in the mid-1960s as a young American diplomat stationed at a small consulate in Belem on the mouth of the Amazon River, the country was in its second year of a 20-year military regime.

Despite the galloping inflation that resulted in zeroes being regularly lopped off the currency and an authoritarian regime that...

When spellers win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, audiences always want to know their secret. Yet this question seems to be asked far more in recent years in response to an Indian-American winning streak.

South...