The visit of Pope Francis to Capitol Hill this week promises to be good theater. It also will lay bare some of the polarities of the political system in the United States.

In the context of American politics, which views everything and everyone in relentlessly...

Cities are acting ambitiously on climate change and that has big implications for the rest of the planet.

Urban officials last week attended the US-China Climate Leaders summit and announced a raft of carbon emissions targets, clean energy partnerships, and initiatives around...

On July 9, Pope Francis stood in front of a crowd that included indigenous peoples and social activists in Bolivia and asked:

forgiveness not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.

On September 23 in...

Pope Francis is visiting Washington, New York and Philadelphia this week.

His visit comes in the wake of his remarkable call for every Catholic parish, religious community, monastery and sanctuary in Europe to take in one...

The western US is burning.

This year’s damaging experience is just the latest in a recent series of devastating wildfire seasons, a trend that will only likely increase over the coming years.

Over the last few decades, and especially since 2000, the wildfire season is getting longer,...

Words are symbols that help humans communicate. The link between words and what they refer to is, with very few exceptions, arbitrary. Many of the words that we currently use (“table,” “dog,” “mug,” etc) could...

What if Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aren’t actually courses at all?

Our research teams at Harvard and MIT have shown over and over again that MOOC students look and act nothing like conventional students of either residential universities or online programs.

With a broader age distribution, a more...

After being suspended without pay from NBC in February, Brian Williams returns to television this week. He won’t be heading back to the Nightly News desk (now anchored by Lester Holt), but he will be reporting breaking news updates on MSNBC, beginning with the...

When I was a college student, art history courses revolved around a 1960s-era carousel slide projector. Its monotonous humming and clicking in the darkened lecture hall often put my classmates to sleep.

For years, technology used in college art...

Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I include a comprehensive set of recipes for turning photographs into...