In the study, people reported that meat that carried a label saying it was from a factory farm tasted worse than meat labeled as “humanely raised,” when the samples were actually identical. The researchers said the results are a basic demonstration that our “affect” — which is a technical term for the ingredients of our […]

Trust is an essential element in the human species.  We depend on trust for our very survival.  An infant cannot survive without being able to trust her nurturing parent.  Marriages that lack trust hit a dead end.  Handshakes that seal a business deal assume genuine trust, which sometimes springs from a leap of faith.  As […]

The effect is dizzying. But it wasn’t enough. After three years of hype, it took just a few hours for players to start complaining that the game was boring or was missing features they had seen in early trailers. Many asked for refunds. What went wrong? “The reaction hasn’t been too surprising to me,” says […]

“Revenue data does fluctuate quite a bit from month to month, so you don’t want to put too much emphasis on any one month or few months,” said Alan Clayton-Matthews, associate professor of economics and public policy at Northeastern University. “But there aren’t any huge red flags I see in the revenue numbers.” State law […]

Broken down by type of offense, the data showed that blacks accounted for 35.5 percent of arrests for selling opium-derived drugs including heroin, morphine and cocaine, and 26 percent when synthetic narcotics including most prescription narcotics were included in the tally. The FBI doesn’t include a category for Hispanics in its statistics. Far from “90-plus […]

The summer of 2014, thousands of employees walked off the job and rallied outside of the Market Basket headquarters in Tewksbury. They were not protesting poor work conditions or asking for higher wages. Instead, workers went on strike in support of an executive: they wanted ousted CEO Arthur T. Demoulas back in charge. The company […]

Over the past few weeks, the political press has settled into a pattern I was hoping we could avoid in 2016: the normalization of the presidential campaign. With increasing frequency, the media are ignoring or playing down negative news about Donald Trump while throwing a collective fit over Hillary Clinton’s appearances of possibilities of rumors […]

Such long-term changes are in train everywhere, and the unusual profile of Mr. Trump adds new wrinkles to the map. He could lose the GOP redoubts of Utah and Idaho (both Republican in every election since 1952 with the exception of the 1964 Barry Goldwater debacle) because of his attacks against Mr. Romney, which did […]

And despite a police-commissioned report by Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice in 2005 outlining the type of police oversight board Boston should have, Mayor Thomas M. Menino settled for a civilian board that is powerless and far too dependent on the Police Department. Menino pointed to union opposition and concerns about excessive oversight […]

In 2014, Northeastern University Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which seeks to uncover details of racially motivated murders during the Jim Crow era, began digging up documents on Hall’s case. Those documents were turned over to Northeastern’s School of Journalism, prompting a year-long investigation into the lynching and the government’s failure to […]

The National Science Foundation is spending roughly half a million dollars to combat “online trolling.” A joint project by Northwestern and Northeastern universities is examining how to create “trolling-free environments” on the Internet. The researchers define online trolls as those who try to influence public opinion by boosting “misleading” and “inauthentic comments.”

San Francisco 49ers NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand for the national anthem at the 49ers, Green Bay Packers game last Friday night. The fire is still burning over that. Kaepernick says it’s a matter of principle. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses […]