Black men are more eager for long-term relationships (in most cases, this means marriage) than black women, according to a new study released jointly by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The results, which surprised the researchers, indicated that 43 percent of black men were inclined to say they wanted […]

Visiting Cuba is like taking a journey in a time machine. The streets are filled with 1950s-era cars. The buildings are vintage art deco (albeit often with crumbling facades). Sounds of Caribbean and African rhythms, often produced by elderly musicians, fill the air. Cuba, however, far from stuck in a time-warp, is in fact a […]

Noble intentions and some benign outcomes notwithstanding, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act has proved to be a very expensive legal monstrosity with dubious constitutional credentials.

Discerning the origins and nature of consciousness is the neuro- science challenge. Does “mind” reduce to “brain”, or not? If not, can information rolling recursively back on itself explain it?

Bee Wilson’s history of the fork—and other kitchen appurtenances—shows us that we are how we eat as well as what we eat. Culinary tools have reflected cultural dispositions in surprising ways, and continue to do so to this very day.

Online classrooms may be the way of the future, but they aren’t very effective without a little old-fashioned face-to-face learning. That’s the finding of a new study from the journal Research & Practice in Assessment, which has conducted one of the first comprenesive studies of the functioning of MOOCs. The study combed through student data from MIT’s “Circuits […]

French President Francois Hollande is dealing with a pension system €14 billion in debt and a political base that is unwilling to do what it takes to stop the bleeding. Keen to avoid the union-mobilized protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets when Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 […]

The Nile actually runs through 11 countries, and therein lies Egypt’s problem. One of those countries, Ethiopia, is planning to dam the mighty Nile. The dam, which will eventually be Africa’s largest, is already under construction, and several days ago Ethiopia began diverting water from the Nile’s normal course. Downstream in Egypt, outrage is gaining […]

At Forbes, John Tamny takes issue with the notion of a higher ed bubble, claiming that it’s based on a misreading of what parents and students hope to get from a college education. If their goal were knowledge, he says, the bubble would have popped long ago; instead, they’re using a degree as a signifier of […]

At their much-hyped “shirtsleeves summit” this weekend, President Obama and President Xi made a deal to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a particularly nasty greenhouse gas used as an industrial refrigerant. HFCs can be replaced relatively cheaply, and the framework for doing so is already in place, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, which got […]