{Audio} We also talk to a man who gave up his house to a homeless family for a year (and the homeless woman that lived there), and to a philosophy professor about the impulse to give.

Northeastern University’s IDEA hit a major milestone. The venture accelerator has awarded $500,000 in gap funding to 35 student- and alumni-founded startups, helping them pave a path to future success. Over the past five years, IDEA’s portfolio has grown to include 150 companies, 14 of which have “launched,” or graduated, from the program. IDEA ventures […]

For nearly half a century, social scientists have operated under the assumption that all basic human emotions are universally recognizable. Countless cross-cultural experiments—not to mention a few television shows—have both directly and implicitly referenced the notion that every person on earth expresses facial emotion in the same way. Regardless of cultural context, we can all […]

When Boston Globe arts reporter Geoff Edgers and multimedia producer Darren Durlach proposed making a documentary about five runners who were crossing the Boston Marathon finish line at the moment that the bombings took place, editor Brian McGrory’s reaction was: Why not? “What do you need? Two weeks?” McGrory recalled asking them. As it turned […]

Since January, Nancy Marche has been sorting and sifting through the memorials that were carefully laid down at Copley Square last year for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. But even after all of these months looking at the items, she manages to discover new, heartfelt messages tucked away on the sides of the […]

Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine may relentlessly denounce Ukraine’s authorities as fascists and xenophobes, but elsewhere in Europe the Russian leader is energetically courting far-right politicians as allies in his confrontation with Western governments. “You can see that the National Front is viewed very favorably in Russia,” says Ludovic de Danne, foreign affairs spokesman for radical-right […]

Most Americans love to reminisce about their first paying job, whether it was scooping ice cream, babysitting, or working behind a retail counter. It was rarely glamorous, but earning that first paycheck was a point of pride and marked a milestone in a teenager’s life. By the time Andrew Sum entered his teenage years, he’d […]

We are notoriously bad at foregoing instant gratification for longer-term rewards. In laboratory studies and in the real world, people frequently make impatient decisions that economists would call “suboptimal,” and, in real-life terms, result in credit card debt, obesity, or drug addiction. Add emotion to the mix, and the decision-making seems to get worse: sad […]

Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to building capital. But as with most virtues, it’s not always easy to muster, since it usually requires resisting temptations for gratification on the sooner side. Should you put the extra $1,000 earned this month in your retirement savings or use it to buy a new suit? […]

American ports — including Boston and New York City — remain porous points of entry to terrorists who can too easily slip weapons of mass destruction into the country hidden in shipping containers. Even President Obama said recently he’s more concerned with “a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan” than Putin’s push into Crimea. He’s […]

In the run-up to this year’s Boston Marathon, commemorations of last year’s bombings and tributes to the survivors have been plentiful — and a new exhibit at the Boston Public Library may be the most dramatic memorial yet. But plans for a permanent memorial remain unclear. Battered old running shoes, handwritten notes of support and […]

Julian Jung was vacationing in Brazil in 2012 when he first had the idea of a mobile app that makes it easy for consumers to book tables at nightclubs and lounges and then split the bill with friends. Jung, 24, turned his idea into Boston-based mobile app Tablelist, which surpassed $200,000 in top-line revenue since […]