Law enforcement officials have described the shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando as a terrorist act. The shooter expressed solidarity with Islamic State in a 911 call. “Terrorism is often said to have a political motivation. But take the politics out and they look a lot like other mass killings in the U.S.: hate-motivated acts […]

“You have to consider traffic from an entire affected area. There are millions and millions of people,” says Alessandro Vespignani, a disease modeling researcher at Northeastern University who is working on modeling how Zika spreads. “The addition to the risk with the Olympics is extremely small.” The Olympics will account for only 1 or 2 […]

Police departments across the country are grappling with how to effectively manage this new stream of evidence. Should body camera footage be treated like any other police record? Or is there something unique about the footage that requires unique legislation like the bill proposed in North Carolina? To find out, Pacific Standard spoke with experts […]

Once a year, when Slava Epstein was growing up in Moscow, his mother took him to the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, a showcase for the wonders of Soviet life. The expo featured many things—from industrial harvesters to Uzbek wine—but Epstein, who began going in the nineteen-sixties, when he was eight or […]

We have witnessed other recent mass killings based on hate, including Dylann Roof’s slaying of nine black churchgoers in Charleston and Wade Michael Page’s shooting of six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc. In such killings, the killer seeks to send a message to an international audience. His purpose is to rid […]

A year ago this month, authorities say, Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people to death during a prayer service. It was soon discovered that Roof—who faces the death penalty if he’s convicted—had espoused hateful views of African-Americans and had posed with the Confederate flag […]

After we’ve switched our Facebook profile pics to rainbow filter, belabored about how to condense our sorrow into 140 characters, posted solidarity pictures on Insta, and ingested the same sound bytes until they’re forever-and-a-day seared into our brains, we start to come to. The difficult process of grieving and sense making begins.

More than 100 casualties, including at least 50 dead, at an Orlando nightclub that catered to the LGBT community. Yet another challenge for police investigators at the crime scene and security experts on the tube is to try to make sense of what seems, at least at this early stage, so hideously senseless.

Since the end of the recession, economic growth has been lackluster despite the Federal Reserve putting the pedal to the metal by pursuing zero interest rates and engaging in bond purchases known as quantitative easing. The rationale for this policy is that artificially suppressed interest rates and easy money are required for the Fed to […]

Researchers at Northeastern University tracked pricing of 1,640 of the best-selling products on Amazon’s site over four months. In particular, they were examining what prices were featured in what’s known as the “buy box,” the area on the right side of an Amazon product page that invites you to add an item to your cart. It is coveted real estate for the […]

But the passage of the new measures likely heralds a more permanent shift – one that is moving away from cigarette smoking as a social norm, says Richard Daynard, president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Boston’s Northeastern University. “I don’t think the tobacco industry lobby is what it once was,” he says. “I […]

The idea that an expanding economy lifts everybody sounds intuitively correct, but sometimes economic effects are counterintuitive. So when it comes to Boston’s booming innovation economy, can we assume that a rising tide will lift all boats? According to Barry Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern University, the answer is no. “A rising tide may actually […]