The smell of cinnamon wafts through the air. My guard is down; resistance is futile. Like a zombie, I roll my luggage across the airport food court and stand in line to pay too much for what I don’t even want, a diet-killing Cinnabon.

I have been phished, at...

Perhaps on the outside looking in, the events at the University of Missouri appear baffling. They’re not.

I taught there from 1996 to 2008. The recent racist incidents and lackadaisical administration response, which sparked the amazing display of student solidarity, is part...

By now, you’ve surely heard that Americans aren’t getting enough sleep.

In our always-on society, a solid chunk of nightly rest seems, well, like a dream. We shave the edges of sleep to keep up, exchanging extra waking hours for compromised healt...

Talk of “coywolves” – a blend of coyote and wolf – is everywhere. There is a PBS special called Meet the Coywolf, a recent article in the Economist, and it is now trending on Facebook. The media really love this new animal name.

There is no...

On Monday afternoon, after days of protests against his failure to address urgent concerns over racism on campus, the University of Missouri’s President Tim Wolfe resigned.

This may have alleviated the immediate tension in Columbia, Missouri, but the...

Canada, paradoxically, is a leader in climate change mitigation at the same time as being one of the world’s laggards. It carries both legacies as its delegates prepare to attend the COP 21 climate change conference in Paris later this month –...

Between 1988 and 2013, the number of cases of polio worldwide plummeted from 350,000 to 406. The number of countries in which the disease was endemic also went down,...

If you haven’t heard by now, the American press recently picked up on an interesting linguistic phenomenon in Norway, where the word “Texas” is slang for “crazy.”

Indeed, it turns out that...

Last night’s Republican debate was focused squarely on the economy, on topics ranging from tax reform to income inequality.

That’s an improvement from the previous debate, held two weeks ago, which was also supposed to be about the economy....

In the summer of 2007, in a bizarre incident shown live on Russian television, scientists accompanied by a couple of senior politicians descended 4,300 meters to the floor of the Arctic Ocean in two Mir mini submarines. Divers then planted a Russian flag on the seabed, and Russia...