How can the nine other Republican candidates at tomorrow’s debate take on Donald Trump? Debate coach and Northeastern University professor Alan Schroeder offered suggestions for debating the GOP front-runner at tomorrow’s Fox News-Facebook Debate, which will kick off at 8:50p ET.

Two hours. Ten candidates. Three moderators. Simple math says not every — and perhaps no — candidate in Thursday’s prime-time, top-tier presidential debate is going to get as much time as he would like to make his case to voters. Some of the 10 candidates’ speaking times may be so minuscule that it’ll be as if […]

Any televised political debate resonates backs to the first ever such match in 1960 when underdog John F. Kennedy outshone Richard M. Nixon at the podium and rode the momentum on to victory in the election. Politicians, media experts, and academicians have pored over the dynamics of that event, analyzing every detail from JFK’s patrician […]

Restraint is the strategic underpinning of how many states confront cyber actions. Despite calls for a response to cyber aggression, the U.S. government still has not decided on a viable reaction given limited options. As David Sanger recounts in the New York Times, “in a series of classified meetings, officials have struggled to choose among […]

The current Lyme treatment is a round of common antibiotics. For chronic Lyme disease, doctors prescribe long-term doses. Studies by Kim Lewis, at Northeastern University in Boston, show that some Borrelia form persister (dormant) cells that evade antibiotics, so the best way to attack them is pulsing (on and off) instead of continuous use of […]

This pivot happens so often in debates that there’s a name for it: the “clubhouse turn.” Northeastern University journalism professor Alan Schroeder, author of several books on presidential debates, traces the phrase’s origin to Michael Sheehan, a debate coach for Bill Clinton and other Democrats. “ ‘Clubhouse turn’ strikes me as a particularly appropriate metaphor […]

In 2012, Massachusetts passed a new set of school nutrition standards mandating which foods should be sold in public middle and high schools statewide. With no financial incentives and little technical assistance from the state, schools were asked to implement those guidelines within their own facilities—and most actually did. Those are the results of a […]

Alan Schroeder is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University who has written extensively about presidential debates. “This comes up every single cycle,” he said when we spoke by phone on Monday morning. “More generally in the general election debates.” Candidates who don’t make the cut try to figure out how to finagle their way […]

One option is to reimagine Widett Circle as a dense 21st century loft manufacturing district. Currently, Widett Circle plays an important role as one of just a few center-city industrial-districts that keep Boston running. Other districts include the Boston Marine Industrial Park, Newmarket, Readville, Charlestown’s Mystic River waterfront, and similar areas in Chelsea and Somerville. […]

Most people, including many scientists, believe that emotions are distinct, locatable entities inside us — but they’re not. Searching for emotions in this form is as misguided as looking for cerebral clarinets and oboes. Of course, we experience anger, happiness, surprise and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being. This seems to imply […]

“This is an exciting and unexpected discovery that questions the standard paradigm in the field,” Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University not involved with the study, told Tech Insider. To understand how mutations in many different genes affect the “fitness,” or ability to survive in and make a host sick, […]

Last year, for instance, the Brookings Institution reported that it took twice as long to fill science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, jobs as non-STEM posts. Meanwhile, academics like Alicia Sasser Modestino, an economics and public policy professor at Northeastern University, have focused attention on the middle-skills section of the labor market — nurses, […]