President Donald Trump threatens people a lot. He menaces, he bullies and then he explains his words away.

As a scholar of American political rhetoric, I have paid close attention to Trump’s use of words. In particular, I’ve focused on something called ad baculum – or threats. Ad baculum...

The Syrian Civil War has been raging for six years. It has killed nearly half a million people and left over 12 million, about half of Syria’s total population, without a home. A few weeks ago, a deva...

Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these people rely exclusively on terms analogous to “a few” or...

Netflix’s new talk show, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” debuted the night before people around the world joined together to demonstrate and March for Science. Many have lauded the timing and...

President Donald Trump recently ordered an air strike on Syria, fueled in part by moral outrage at images of babies being injured and killed by airborne toxins.

American babies are under threat as well. In this case, the culprit is the Trump administration’s proposal to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent,...

From 2009 to 2016, a cybercrime network called Avalanche grew into one of the world’s most sophisticated criminal syndicates. It resembled an international conglomerate, staffed by corporate executives, advertising salespeople...

Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of archival stories.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised Mexico would pay for a border war separating it from the U.S.

With that unlikely anytime soon, the president has been demanding Congress include funding for his proposed barrier in the budget lawmakers are hastily trying to finish by...

Diseases don’t stop at borders. On World Malaria Day, this is especially important to understand and to consider.

We’ve been fighting malaria for decades, and yet it still claimed nearly half a million lives in 2015. About 70...

To justify President Donald Trump’s aim to spend less on social services, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney declared, “We can’t spend money on programs just because they sound good.” Who can argue with that?

Not us.

Like anyone else, we want our taxpayer dollars spent wisely. Funding programs that...

Staying one step ahead of the competition in the hypercompetitive restaurant industry requires more than simply tinkering with the menu. Serving tasty food doesn’t do much good if customers don’t stay...