Some journalists and other social commentators have in recent years called for the abolition of restaurant tipping, primarily because they argue that it hurts workers. Several restaurateurs have even replaced tipping at their restaurants with automatic...

Toward the mid-1990s, America Online (by then going by its nickname, AOL) was the company through which most Americans accessed the internet. As many as half of the CD-ROMs produced at the time bore the near-ubiquitous AOL logo, offering early...

For the first time in nearly a decade, the United States Congress is about to take up legislation to upgrade the Higher Education Act – the federal law that governs how the federal government supports and regulates higher...

Every day, city governments collect vast amounts of administrative data – local property tax assessments, 911 emergency response calls, social assistance recipients and more.

These data have huge potential to enhance residents’ quality of life and stimulate...

Name all the billion-dollar crops grown in the U.S. Midwest. The answer: Corn, soybeans and cranberries. Wait, what?

Roughly 60 percent of the U.S. cranberry crop is produced in Wisconsin, generating close to US$1 billion in revenue and 4,000 jobs. Other top-producing states include Massachusetts, New...

It is almost Christmas time, and the song “Santa Claus is coming to town” keeps playing over and over.

For me, the key lines of this jingle are “He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.” The implications of this are clear: Good...

Even though only about one in 50 Americans is Jewish, U.S. Jews donate at high levels, both as individuals and as a community.

As a scholar who studies community philanthropy, I am doing research to discover what accounts for this outsized generosity...

Historian James Cook, in his 2001 book “The Arts of Deception,” points to July 1835 as “the birth date of modern American popular culture.”

That month, a frustrated grocer named...

The new tax reform bill has led to an intense debate over whether it would help or hurt the poor. Tax reform in general raises critical issues about whether the government should redistribute income and promote equality in the first...

Parents often receive books at pediatric checkups via programs like Reach Out and Read and hear from a variety of health professionals and educators that reading to their kids is critical for supporting development.

The pro-reading message is getting through to parents, who...