Several months ago I re-read what David Halberstam had to say about theWashington Post in The Powers That Be, his monumental 1979 book about the rise of thePost, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine and CBS News. As we celebrate the life and career of thePost’s legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, who died on Tuesday, it’s […]

Senior fall was fast approaching at this point and I was feeling slightly pressed for time as my entire college list needed to be reworked. At Mr. Barnard’s suggestion, my mother and I took a tour of Northeastern University in Boston. I drove there keeping my expectations low, dreading that I would have a similar […]

Amherst’s role in creating its reputation as one of the safest cities in the United States is now the subject of a new book. Criminologist Simon Singer, a professor at Northeastern University, will be at the University at Buffalo next month to present two free talks about his book, “America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity […]

His defense attorney argued in closing statements that Phillipos’ friends were speaking Russian and he was unsure what they were doing. His attorney also said Phillipos had been smoking marijuana for 14 hours before he was interviewed by FBI agents. The attorney compared them to “wolves, waiting” to interrogate Tsarnaev’s friends. Daniel Medwed, a law […]

Travel bans are security theater—but they aren’t harmless. Wendy Parmet of the Northeastern University School of Law notes that this illusion of safety—the myth that we are doing something to protect ourselves—“gives us the false assurance that we can ignore the problems that are happening in Africa. At the end of the day, we can’t. […]

They work on U.S. construction sites and farms, in restaurants and hotels, even in homes. Foreign workers, lured by false promises of good jobs in America, soon find themselves enslaved in plain sight as victims of labor trafficking, according to a new report published by the nonpartisan Urban Institute and Northeastern University. About half of […]

Most victims of human trafficking in the United States arrived in the country with a legal work visa, according to a new report by Northeastern University and the Urban Institute, and later became indentured servants after their immigration papers were taken away by traffickers and recruiters. Those who brought the workers to the United States […]

Some of our favorite building materials are also the most vulnerable. Think of glass–floor-to-ceiling windows are awesome, until they fall 18 stories onto the street. But we typically think of concrete as solid. Concrete structures from ancient Rome, like the Pantheon and the Colosseum, are still standing almost 2,000 years later. However, a new study […]

Humans have so much influence over the global environment today that we have crossed a major threshold in Earth’s long history, entering a new stage in geological time which some scientists call the Anthropocene – the “Age of Us”. Experts, journalists, and advocates have warned us about the threats of climate change, ocean acidification, species […]

Yet health authorities continue to favor voluntary isolation instead of strictly enforced quarantines, saying the virus is not contagious until the person is suffering symptoms and enforced quarantines can do more harm than good. “If you make people feel as if they will be stigmatized and outcast and scapegoated, they’re not going to come forward […]

In recent decades, a new philosophy in law enforcement had been applied to schools. It was “deal with the small stuff so they won’t go to the big stuff, and also it sent a strong message of deterrence,” said James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of criminology at Boston’s Northeastern University. The zero-tolerance approach started […]

Once considered by some as a dumping ground for underachieving students, vocational programs at some public high schools offer many more opportunities than those of yesteryear. “Nowadays it is completely different,” says Kim Curry, dean of admissions at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts​. “The kids are fighting tooth and nail to come here.” The […]