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 […]

As college freshmen with a painfully early 8 a.m. accounting class, Johnny Fayad and Ali Kothari had a perpetual problem: They could never get up early enough to get coffee before class. “After going through another bleary-eyed lecture, we asked ourselves, ‘Why can’t we eat our coffee?” Fayad and Kothari say. Months later, the CoffeeBar […]

At least 435 people have been killed in Iraq in car and suicide bombings since the beginning of the month, with an uptick in the number of these attacks since the beginning of September, according to Iraq Body Count, a monitoring group tracking civilian deaths. Most of those attacks occurred in Baghdad and are the work of Islamic […]

James Alan Fox, a widely quoted researcher from Northeastern University in Boston, has argued that mass shootings are not on the rise, and that they are too rare to merit significant policy changes. As he put it recently in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We treasure our personal freedoms in America, and unfortunately, occasional […]

State, local and federal authorities can all issue quarantines, which separate and restrict the movement of people who were exposed to a communicable disease. But it’s often state authorities that order them. Those health agencies often have significant powers to issue a quarantine if they suspect someone has come into contact with a disease like […]