One of the ongoing themes of the current presidential campaign is that Americans are becoming increasingly distrustful of those who walk the corridors of power – Exhibit A being the Republican presidential primary, in which three of the top four candidates are outsiders of...

What is among the first actions that brutal totalitarian regimes take upon assuming power? They imprison, exile or “disappear” teachers.

Dictators employ such harsh tactics because of the role teachers play in society. Teachers provide not only a...

Imagine this: you spend a day in a typical American public school going from one classroom to another, observing what teachers do. Then you do the same in Finland. What would you expect to see?

Many things would probably look similar. But, without a doubt, you would...

“You’re in engineering!?! Wow, you must be super-smart…”

It has been over 10 years since I was a first-year engineering undergraduate student; but when I remember the time a fellow female student made this comment, I...

Global warming is accelerating the thawing of permafrost – soil that has been at or below the freezing point of water for approximately two or more years. This releases the potent greenhouse gas methane to the...

If you read or watch detective stories, you probably don’t think about them as an expression of economic principles.

But at their heart, that’s exactly what they are. And it’s not just detective stories, but works of fictions of all genres are...

All killers are Norman Bates – anti-social mama’s boys.

Or so the news media tell us in their instant profiles of the gunmen who shoot up schools, churches, military bases and other...

Editor’s note: In the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, we asked two public health researchers on gun violence to help us understand this latest violent act. Sandro Galea is the Dean of Boston...

I fear our senses will become dulled to horrific news like Thursday’s, when a gunman opened fire on an Oregon community college, killing nine and wounding 10. I fear we will forget, again and again.

Oregon is one of the seven states that now have provisions allowing the...

A dozen years ago, in his New York Times review of the best-selling British novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame) called it “stark, funny...