The New Yorker Captured in Watertown Like most everyone else in Watertown, Jennifer Rivera, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant and volunteer E.M.T., felt a mixture of relief and apprehension on Friday when, at around 6P.M., Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick lifted the “shelter-in-place” order that had kept her cooped up with her roommates all day. “I mean, I know everyone had cabin fever. But […]
The Christian Science Monitor Texas fertilizer plant: Why was the blast so enormous? Ammonium nitrate may be the more likely candidate in the explosion. In small quantities, the white pellets won’t detonate, notes Ronald Willey, a chemical engineering professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Many drugstore cold packs use the compound because, when water is also put in the packs, the mixture absorbs heat from its surroundings. But the compound begins […]
Long-term joblessness hits older workers hard The number of people 45 and older who have been jobless for more than a year has quadrupled since 2007, accounting for nearly half of the 3.5 million Americans out of work for more than a year, according to the US Department of Labor. “Historically, we’ve never seen anything that comes close to this; these […]
Fixing Black History Month So instead of constant odes to the past, I want to see people like Marquis Landon Cabrera lauded during Black History Month. Just a few decades ago, the 24-year-old Cabrera would have been considered a statistic with poor odds. He bounced around foster homes till he was 15. But then he was adopted by a […]
The Boys at the Back A third reason: improving the performance of black, Latino and lower-income kids requires particular attention to boys. Black women are nearly twice as likely to earn a college degree as black men. At some historically black colleges, the gap is astounding: Fisk is now 64 female; Howard, 67 percent; Clark Atlanta, 75 percent. The economist […]
Police: Ore. Mall Shooter Used Stolen Rifle On average, there are about 20 mass murders every year, and the trend has been steady since the 1970s, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston and author of five books on mass murder. The typical mass murderer is a socially isolated white man in his 30s or 40s. […]
Not Perfect, but They Serve a Purpose Televised debates between candidates for the White House are not perfect vehicles. But compared with other forms of political communication — speeches, interviews, advertisements, campaign Web sites and the like — they offer advantages found nowhere else.
Communities Struggle to Break a Grim Cycle of Killing BATON ROUGE, La.—Police found Silas Gibbs Jr. early in the morning of March 3, slumped against the seat belt in a red Mustang, with blood streaming from his ears and mouth. He had been shot, allegedly by one of his closest friends. Mr. Gibbs, 24 years old, is one of hundreds of young black men […]
Academia Occupied by Occupy If surveys of Occupy Wall Street supporters conducted last fall still hold true, the crowds of protesters expected to turn out Tuesday forMay Day events across the country will most likely skew male, young, white, college educated, underpaid, and thoroughly disgusted with the American political system.
A Researcher and a Robot Walk Into a Bar… When they appear on stage, Heather Knight, a robotics graduate student, and Data, her stand-up-comedy-performing robot, seem like a futuristic Odd Couple. Ms. Knight is tall, blond and human while Data—sheathed in a white plastic shell and about a third her size—resembles a RoboCop action figure.