Seen from America, the mayhem on the streets of Britain has more in common with “wilding” than rioting of the type that destroyed US cities such as Detroit and Newark in the 1960s.

The Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute concludes its regular season this weekend with a pair of musical programs which, though quite different, are based on the same premise: that while great music is timeless and able to stand on its own, the experience of that music can be greatly enriched when you know the story of […]

Attendance at summer orientation for incoming college students and at least one parent was mandatory. Yet, as soon as we arrived, they separated us. Different dorms a few blocks apart — one with air conditioning for the people presumably footing the bill, one without. Separate schedules jam-packed with similar PowerPoint presentations and evening activities.

From Boston boardrooms to factory floors to kitchen tables across the state, a constant drumbeat of negative news is deepening financial anxiety, threatening to curb business development and consumer spending, and undermining an already weak economy.

In an article entitled — “IT’S NOT U, IT’S ME :-(” — in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Benoit Denizet-Lewis describes a one-day crash-course called “Healthy Breakups,” held last month in Boston. Sponsored by the Boston Public Health Commission in collaboration with Northeastern University, the conference was intended to help teen participants learn how […]

Standard & Poor’€™s -€” the same rating agency that touted insurance giant AIG, Fannie Mae and subprime mortgage-backed securities before their collapses nearly sank the economy -€” is now taking heavy fire after downgrading U.S. credit, a move that drove markets down sharply yesterday.

About 45,000 Verizon employees, including 6,000 in Massachusetts, went on strike today after failing to reach a new union contract in one of the biggest labor actions in the US in recent years.

Honeybees under stress apparently become pessimistic, just like anxious mammals (including humans).

More than half of the 114 House Democrats who signed a letter vowing to support a “clean” increase to the nation’s debt ceiling rejected the final deal earlier this week.

PALE, bespectacled and polite, Bekir Berat Ozipek, a young professor at Istanbul’s Commerce University, is no street-fighter. But he was excited by the heady atmosphere he experienced on a recent trip to Egypt. He and two fellow Turkish scholars went to a conference at the University of Cairo where their ideas on civil-military relations were […]

As we head toward the end of the week when the government will release July’s employment data, the economy, we now know, grew only 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2011, rather than 1.9 percent, as reported previously. Overhanging this dismaying news, the acrimony of the debt ceiling crisis lingers in the Washington atmosphere.

To change the beliefs of an entire community, only 10 percent of the population needs to become convinced of a new or different opinion, suggests a new study. At that tipping point, the idea can spread through social networks and alter behaviors on a large scale.