There’s also a case to be made that better insurance coverage could have prevented the rise in opioid deaths. As Northeastern University drug policy expert Leo Beletsky pointed out and others have argued, one of the big reasons that doctors resorted to opioid painkillers to treat their patients’ pain in the first place is because […]

“Tax-exempt hospitals, tax-exempt organizations, are perceived by the public to have this higher social standard. They’re expected to behave in ways that are not profit-driven,” said Gary Young, director of the Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who was the lead author of the 2013 NEJM study. Those expectations […]

Carey Rappaport, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Awareness and Localization of Explosive-Related Threats Center, acknowledged that the restrictions present a real inconvenience for people, particularly those who use the devices to get work done during long flights. “But if there’s credible intelligence that terrorists are threatening us with more effective means […]

Lisa Feldman Barrett says we need to revamp our thinking on emotions. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, where she applies psychology and neuroscience research to explore how emotions arise in the brain. In her new book, How Emotions are Made, she challenges the classical view, which holds that emotions are […]

Northeastern University announced Tuesday that its new cybersecurity institute will be led by a director of engineering at Google, a coup for academia as well as a city known for losing more bright minds to the Silicon Valley tech industry than it steals back. John Manferdelli will head the Northeastern University Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, […]

One particular challenge is pinpointing hate crimes against immigrants, said Jack McDevitt, director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University. In cities such as Boston that are declared sanctuaries for immigrants, local law enforcement agencies decline to enforce immigration rules, leaving that job to the federal government. “Police don’t want to ask […]

Timothy Gagnon, an associate professor of accounting at Northeastern University, questions the effectiveness of states asking for driver’s license information. “They don’t think someone who got your Social Security [number] and name and address won’t have that?” he said sarcastically. “And I don’t like them collecting more information that they don’t need to have in […]

In response to this informational deficit, a seven-person research team from Northeastern University was deployed along the western Balkan migration route into Europe (see map below) to speak with Syrian migrants, learn how and why they have left their country, and study the consequences of their migration to themselves and to Europe. Members of the […]

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s slide in the public eye from policy wonk to partisan hack was a long time coming. But it finally reached its bottom during the past few weeks in two revealingly smug displays of insolence.

Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University who studies hate crimes, agrees. “Unquestionably, there has been a larger number of hate attacks generally, including hate-motivated actions against Jews, since Trump’s election,” says Levin, a professor emeritus of criminology and sociology. “You really do have to talk about the expressed attitudes of our leaders. Rightly or […]

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Northeastern University professor of psychology, is at the forefront of the “constructed emotion” theory. In this view, emotions aren’t standard across all human brains. For example: Fear does not have a specific operating location in the brain, nor does it create a universal response, like widening your eyes.

Legal experts compared the alleged crime to sending a letter bomb in the mail, or to purposely giving a person a dangerous allergic reaction. “What is new, because of the technology, is the ease with which certain individuals can be targeted across state lines by remotely distant perpetrators,” said Andrea Matwyshyn, a law professor at […]