Comments often serve as identity badges, said Joseph Reagle, the author of “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” and a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. “You see this particularly on social media,” he told me. The comment is meant to tell the world, “This is who […]

“Even if there’s compelling evidence that insanity is plausible, juries certainly don’t buy it,” James Alan Fox, who studies criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, told NPR shortly after the June 2015 shooting in Charleston. “They look at nine people killed and they believe, not wrongly, but they do believe that someone who will get […]

Richard Lapchick, the founder and former director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, was among those who celebrated withKareem Abdul-Jabbar when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom last week. Lapchicktweeted a couple photos of himself with Abdul-Jabbar and other attendees of the star-studded ceremony, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., […]

Northeastern University economist and professor Alan Clayton-Matthews agreed, but pointed out that the view from the rest of the state isn’t quite as rosy. “The economy is great in Greater Boston, but much less so in the rest of the state,” Clayton-Matthews said. “Boomers are retiring, but Millennials entering the workforce are offsetting the loss […]

“There are so many dimensions to the culture,” said Murray Forman, a media studies professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s really rich for analysis in all kinds of contexts.” Some scholars still question whether hip-hop has a place in academia, but its acceptance is growing, said Forman, who was a Nasir Jones fellow last […]

It’s just a matter of time, perhaps as little as five years, before more retailers take up the practice, said Christo Wilson, an assistant professor and researcher in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. His recent academic research found some retailers offering consumers different products depending on whether they were shopping […]

Jack Levin explained why it’s important to prosecute hate crimes with the full force of the law in an interview with Mother Jones: “The perpetrator is sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” Levin said, noting that hate crimes send ripples throughout the targeted community. “We need to send the message back that […]

Experts believe Zika moved explosively in the Americas because there was no prior exposure. It’s not clear how widely Zika has circulated in Africa and Asia, whether there could be pockets of natural immunity – and, importantly, whether immunity to one strain would confer immunity to another. One recent review of studies suggests 15 to […]

“This drug seems likely to be approved for sleeping sickness, and is an excellent example of drug discovery scientists ‘rescuing’ a compound that was otherwise in the dustbin of a large drug company,” Michael Pollastri, an associate professor at Northeastern University, told HuffPost.

Attending the theater before 1850 or so in the United States was far more akin to attending a football game today than to attending contemporary theater. The audience was expected to make some noise, and as the scene at “Richard III” shows, it exercised the right to influence what happened on the stage as well […]

The problem isn’t that technology companies have designed systems that are explicitly discriminatory but that they enable people to act on their biases, said Christo Wilson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and an author of the new study. “There are limits to what you can do to make your users act differently,” he said. But […]

That system has helped insulate Google from the controversy over fake news because, unlike Facebook, Google’s search engine rarely surfaces fringe websites that distribute propaganda. But academics say the search algorithm’s opacity is still a concern, given Google’s dominant role. “No one really knows what (Google’s search engine) is doing,” said Christo Wilson, a Northeastern […]