“You’ll have to excuse us, because we’re about to serve lunch, and it’s total chaos,” says Marilyn Hurwitz, striding through the busy lobby of the Swampscott Senior Center toward a multipurpose room where...
Home to the largest number of American Indians in the country, California is now the first state in the nation to ban the use of “Redskins” as a school team name or mascot. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the ban into law on...
According to Nicole Arbour’s YouTube video “ Dear Fat People ,” fat people deserve to be ridiculed and treated poorly. The comedian mocks obese people and accuses them of being lazy, smelly, self-destructive, and a burden to...
These days, Henry Montgomery, 69, is known as the man of few words who works in a gym at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Josh Carter, 70, worked next to Montgomery for years, cleaning a prison gym after games, but he knows little...
KPOVÉ, Togo — The church grounds here sprawled through a strange, dreamlike forest. More than 150 men and women were chained by the ankle to a tree or concrete block, a short walk from the central place of worship. Most were...
IN the United States today, thousands of children under 18 have recently taken marital vows — mostly girls married to adult men, often with approval from local judges. In at least one case, a 10-year-old boy was legally married. How is...
The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that could determine the fate of more than 2,000 convicted juvenile murderers. In 2012, the high court struck down as unconstitutional state laws that mandated an automatic sentence of...
Laws governing debt collection lawsuits and garnishments are often antiquated, poorly thought out, and place the burden on debtors to know their rights. Below are ideas for commonsense reforms. LOWER HOW MUCH CAN BE TAKEN FROM DEBTORS' WAGES...
A thought-provoking new paper from Oxford neuroscientists Stephen Smith and colleagues reports a correlation between a certain pattern of brain activity and, well, a great many things. The researchers took 461 resting state...
Amid the bloodbaths of 21st-century America, you might think that there would be a lot of research into the causes of gun violence, and which policies work best against it. You would be wrong. Gun interests, wary of any possible limits on...
The Chicago O'Hare Airport ground crew is used to dealing with nature. They de-ice planes in the winter and roll over steaming hot runways in the summer. As hearty Chicagoans, they felt ready for anything nature might send their way — that is,...
“Sitting constantly in dilapidated cars wrecks their spines, and the ceaseless shouting that goes on in the streets of Cairo destroys their nervous systems,” Khaled Al Khamissi wrote in his 2007 book Taxi , a collection of...
With a newly developed computer model, researchers were able to successfully predict which 5 percent of U.S. Army soldiers committed more than one-third of all major Army workplace violent crimes over a six-year period. The researchers said that the...
The Justice Department’s upcoming release of some 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders is an unprecedented move that has been hailed by proponents of criminal justice reform. A top attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union called it...
When a Florida woman failed to show up to court to testify against her husband, who allegedly choked her in front of their toddler, a judge tore into her before putting her behind bars. A Florida judge is under fire for berating a victim...