The Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett G. Price III joined Boston Public Radio for their regular Monday segment, “All Revved Up.” They talked about the shooting in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina last week, including what to label the shooting, and whether we’re focused on the right things in the wake […]

Inside a secure facility at Northeastern University, Dr. Adam Hall, shows me how a spectrometer works. It’s an instrument used to measure wavelengths of light spectra. I’m here to speak with Hall about bombs and bomb making. In addition to being a chemist and academic, Hall is also a former forensics expert for the Massachusetts […]

Although Apple is likely to use some algorithms to filter stories, the hiring of experienced journalists is a positive step, said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University. “A lot of people don’t want to be fed news that a robot has decided interests them,” Kennedy told AFP. “Especially if you don’t have any […]

More details are emerging about Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old suspect in the shooting deaths of nine people in Charleston. NPR’s Scott Simon speaks with Northeastern University professor James Fox.

A photograph of suspected Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, found on a website that may belong to him, shows Roof crouched over the numbers “1488” etched in the sand. The numbers have special significance to white supremacists. In 2008, after an assassination plot against then-candidate Barack Obama was discovered, Brian Palmer explained why.The article is reprinted […]

What does it mean to identify across race lines and to claim a racial identity disconnected from background or biology? Why does so-called reverse passing (white to black) generate such extraordinary attention and controversy? The Rachel Dolezal case reveals a conundrum in race debates that remains unresolved.

This piece was initially published on Storybench, a cookbook for digital storytelling. Storybench is a collaboration between Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program, a new graduate degree in digital journalism, and Esquire magazine. Since the latest wunderkind app Periscope, which allows anyone with a smartphone to easily live-stream video to followers, hit smartphones in March, media […]

Mass shootings appear to be on the rise across the country, according to researchers at Harvard University and Northeastern University, who found that such an incident — with four or more victims — occurred on average every 64 days in the two years leading up to September 2013. In the 29 years before that, they […]

According to F.B.I. statistics, only a small minority of the people who commit hate crimes are affiliated with an intolerant group. Jack McDevitt, a criminologist at Northeastern University who studies hate crimes, thinks that Hicks’s act should be classified as one. “With hate crimes, it’s not always an either/or,” he said. “You can decide you […]

As with many others who commit massacres, it is not a matter of psychotic thinking and a sudden eruption of rage at victims, this time six women and three men, chosen randomly, but a deliberate, methodical design to exact revenge on a class of people whom the shooter sees as responsible for his own disappointments. […]

“What we could be seeing are some copycats being inspired by each other. There are certainly some similarities in these cases,” said terror expert and Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms, referring to the recent alleged plot in Boston to behead cops. Usaamah Rahim of Roslindale was shot dead after authorities say he lunged at police […]

Only the gunman knows for sure why he chose Emanuel for the deadly outburst. Jack Levin, co-director of Northeastern University’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, and the author of several books on hate crimes and mass murder, speculated that the shooter knew that a black church would be a place that offered a large […]