WGBH How the Washington Post explained Eric Cantor’s defeat before it happened The political press today is engorged with analysis that attempts to explain why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the Republican primary in his Virginia district to a Tea Party challenger on Tuesday. But given that the pundits were as surprised as everyone else, there is no particular reason to think they are capable of […]
New York Magazine Mass shootings aren’t on the rise It’s only natural, faced with atrocities like those that took place in Aurora or Sandy Hook or Isla Vista, to sink into a “What the hell is wrong with the world?” attitude. And based on the conversations that often follow these tragedies, it would be easy to think that life in the United States is […]
Forbes Did multinationals use a foreign earnings tax holiday to burnish their financials rather than reduce taxes? It was a terrible idea back in 2004. It is still a terrible idea—and two very different analyses help explain why. The first, by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates that while cutting taxes for one year on repatriated earnings briefly generates new revenue, it significantly increases the deficit even within Congress’ usual 10-year […]
The downward ramp Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University, is the lead author of a Brookings Institution paper published in March, “The Plummeting Labor Market Fortunes of Teens and Young Adults.” In an email, Sum wrote that “problems of mal-employment among young college grads had increased since 2000, leaving more of them in jobs that do not […]
Chicago Tribune ‘Light’ cigarette case comes back to life Zombies are everywhere. On television, in the movies and on the docket of the Illinois Supreme Court. A $10.1 billion verdict against cigarette-maker Philip Morris USA has come back to life after it was overturned about nine years ago. The class-action case is up for review at the state Supreme Court, again. “Many people had […]
Wallet Hub 2014 FIFA World Cup by the numbers Q&A with Thomas Vicino and Wallet Hub Q: Sponsors seem to be placing big bets on there being record U.S. interest in the World Cup — will they be right? A: After Brazilians, Americans have purchased more tickets (over 150,000 tickets) to World Cup matches than any other country. We live in a more globalized […]
WGBH Boston’s vanishing middle class “I think that unless we can find a way to solve our housing problem, we cannot solve the income inequality problem,” said Barry Bluestone, an economist at Northeastern University’s Dukakis Center. “Because if you think about income inequality, it’s not just, ‘Do you have a high income or a low income,’ it’s ‘How much does […]
How the Las Vegas shooting does and doesn’t fit the pattern of mass shootings The two shooters in the Las Vegas violence were a man and a woman, police said, which also makes this episode unusual, because 97 percent of these shooters are male. Las Vegas police said they believe the female shooter shot and killed the male gunman before taking her own life. According to the FBI, four […]
ABC News Trial that could reshape college athletics begins This is the first time a challenge to the way the NCAA operates has gotten this far. It is part of a broader effort to change the way major college sports are operated that includes several other lawsuits challenging various NCAA regulations and a unionization effort that won a vote for football players at Northwestern […]
The colorful world of comics Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University, is the 2014 winner of the Boston Authors Club’s Julia Ward Howe Award for “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance” (HarperCollins). “Miss Anne” is a term applied to white women who played a role in the Harlem Renaissance, some of […]
National Post Justin Bourque’s alienation nurtured in the cold confines of social media The online bluster adds up to what sociologists call a sense of aggrieved entitlement, and like virtually all mass murders, Mr. Bourque’s alleged actions — he now faces three first-degree murder charges, and two of attempted murder — sought to ease it by indulging in a brutal revenge. “That’s part of a much larger trend […]
Denver Post Lipsher: Who would you save first: man or dog? A study released by the American Sociological Association last year indicated that most people feel greater empathy toward dogs than other humans. Northeastern University sociology professors Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke reported that we are far more disturbed by accounts of abused dogs and babies — due to their vulnerability and dependency — than we […]