With the full Senate scheduled to vote on Ben Carson’s nomination to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it is worth considering one question that must be on Carson’s mind: Is HUD working?

There can be no question that HUD has enormous impact. With an annual...

Editor’s note: President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28. The speech featured policy ideas that appealed to Republicans, and others that sounded more Democratic. We asked scholars to react to the substance of the speech and evaluate its tone for hints of bipartisanship.

Is there any hope for...

Marijuana-infused foods – often called edibles – are becoming more and more popular in states such as Colorado, where recreational marijuana is sold.

In the first quarter of 2014, the first year recreational sales...

Recent vandalism in Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia illustrates the all too real problem of hate crime faced by many communities in the United States.

Just this February, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that for the second year in a row the number of hate groups in the United States has been growing – up from 892 in 2015...

I’m an anthropologist who grew up in Japan and has lived there, off and on, for 22 years. Yet every visit to Tokyo’s Harajuku District still surprises me. In the eye-catching styles modeled by fashion-conscious young adults, there’s a...

Since its invention around 100 B.C. in China, paper as a material for spreading information has greatly contributed to the development and spread of civilization. Even in today’s information age, with electronic media omnipresent in homes, offices and even our pockets, paper still...

At President Donald Trump’s request, a portrait of former President Andrew Jackson now hangs in the Oval Office. Commentators have cast Trump’s populist appeal and inaugural address as “Jacksonian,” while others have tried to emphasize their major differences. One writer lauded Jackson as “the president who, more than...

The warm and productive waters of La Réunion, an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, are home to many types of tropical sea life, including apex predators such as sharks. Eight fatal shark attacks on humans have occurred there since 2011. After a body boarder was killed by a...

Some politicians have never made a secret of their desire to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as its companion agency the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

Each of these agencies have traditionally been regarded as bastions of “liberalism,” making them...

President Trump’s executive order to sharply restrict immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries has been decried by many as reckless, punitive and even unconstitutional. Nearly half the electorate, however, applaud the president for suspending immigration even...