The Conversation

New York 2140: A novelist's vision of a drowned city that still never sleeps

Written by Robert Kopp, Professor, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, and Director, Coastal Climate Risk & Resilience Initiative, Rutgers University

Climate fiction: A novel describes New Yorkers keeping on even after 50 feet of sea-level rise next century.www.shutterstock.com

Earth’s climate system is replete with potential surprises, and the climate science community tends to be conservative when projecting future changes. The world also suffers from a creative deficit in imagining the...

How our morals might politically polarize just about anything

Written by Randy Stein, Assistant Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

DonkeyHotey/flickr, CC BY-SA

When news breaks about wrongdoings of our favorite politician, the other side inevitably argues that we have a scandal on our hands. We like to think that our superior grasp of logic is what enables us to reason through and reject the other side’s concerns.

But, a series of three studies I recently published...

Americans and Mexicans living at the border are more connected than divided

Written by Michael Dear, Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

In 2002, I began traveling the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border on both sides. From Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, the border measures almost 2,000 miles.

What distinguished my journey was that I began traveling well before the idea of fortifying the U.S.-Mexico border entered public consciousness. Inadvertently, I became witness to...

Lessons in resistance from MLK, the 'conservative militant'

Written by Christopher Beem, Managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy, Pennsylvania State University

Just days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, activists from Greenpeace climbed up a large construction crane near the White House and unfurled a large banner with the single word: Resist.

On Feb. 11, thousands of protesters used their bodies to spell the word “resist” on a San Francisco beach. The next day, at the...

Why Wall Street is like a used car lot

Written by Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University

In 1792, before there was the internet, the telephone or even the telegraph, securities trading began on Wall Street.

A small group of dealers, who met under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, agreed to trade only with each other and established a minimum fee for their service. At that time, most trading involved the buying and selling of...

America's broadband market needs more competition

Written by Hernán Galperin, Research Associate Professor of Communication, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

How many people are trying to connect America's cities?Network workers via shutterstock.com

The United States is home to some of the most creative people and businesses on the planet. Our filmmakers, artists, software engineers and scientists entertain the world and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. Their creative process is often a...

Communicating climate change: Focus on the framing, not just the facts

Written by Rose Hendricks, Ph.D. Candidate in Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego

How you package the information matters.Frame image via www.shutterstock.com.

Humans are currently in a war against global warming. Or is it a race against global warming? Or maybe it’s just a problem we have to deal with?

If you already consider climate change a pressing issue, you might not think carefully about the way you talk about it...

Can the government save money by privatizing prisons, Medicare and other functions?

Written by Richard Lachmann, Professor of Sociology, University at Albany, State University of New York

A detention center in Eloy, Arizona. AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo

Should we run the government like a business?

Donald Trump seems to think so. During his campaign for president, Trump returned again and again to his supposed success as a businessman and promised government programs “under budget and ahead of schedule.” His hotel in...

What would Mark Twain think of Donald Trump?

Written by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of Chinese and World History, University of California, Irvine

Twain was an opinionated, prolific commentator on the personalities and political issues of his day.Terry Ballard/flickr, CC BY

Thanks to the criticisms they’ve leveled in articles, interviews, tweets and letters to the editor, we know that many contemporary authors, from Philip Roth to J.K. Rowling, have a dim view of Donald J. Trump.

But...

Tooth be told: Millions of years of evolutionary history mark those molars

Written by Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, Professor of Anthropology, The Ohio State University

Upper teeth of a Neanderthal who lived about 40,000 years ago.Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, CC BY-NC

“Show me your teeth and I’ll tell you who you are.” These words, attributed to 19th-century naturalist George Cuvier, couldn’t be more correct. The pearly whites we use every day over and over and over again are clues not just...