Latest Ideas headlines

Both political and seasonal October vibes continue with Beth Wolfensberger Singer’s latest cartoon.

If you were an investor in an outfit called India Globalization Capital, October was a choppy ride.

Compared to dolphins and chimpanzees, dogs’ cognitive capacity isn’t quite so impressive.

We’ve all got to breathe, but sometimes it can be such a drag.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

The law is about to catch up to electric scooters.

Transit innovations will change the way we commute. But there are some things that will never change.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

The Kavanaugh hearings have been carried out at the nexus of two key American institutions.

Approach the city from the north, south, west, or the harbor, and you can’t miss Henry Cobb’s vision.

As far back as the 1960s, the president’s ability to alert the nation was seen as a crucial part of confronting the only national emergency that mattered: nuclear war.

Science journals are not printed on litmus paper, but here’s a case in which politics appears to have triumphed over academic freedom.

Humans and octopuses are separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree, yet our brains both respond to ecstasy.

Researchers see opportunities for experts to remotely train workers in new tasks, but there are still some problems to be worked out.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

Jay Gonzalez’s gubernatorial campaign tries to find an effective line of attack against Governor Charlie Baker in this editorial cartoon.

Meghna Chakrabarti and David Folkenflik sat down for a wide-ranging interview on the increasingly complex media landscape.

The Constitution explicitly guaranteed African-Americans’ right to go to the polls, but states just ignored it. What does it take to turn the law into more than just words on paper?

When better monitoring leads to better science.

In the United States, about 20,000 kidney transplants are performed each year — too slow a pace for the 95,000 Americans waiting for new kidneys.

As the playoffs approach, it’s worth paying a little attention to the mitts and gloves that make so much drama on the diamond possible.

Some perfectly reasonable questions about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s forthcoming system that allows the president to send out text alerts.

What happened when Boston’s schools tried for equity with an algorithm?

The year was 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was building support for African-American voting rights, one protest at a time. The political pressures, from the White House on down, were enormous.

The earliest known human drawing goes way back.

It took cooks in Natick more than 20 years to get a pizza that could meet all the military’s requirements.

Unusual insights from the social sciences.

Share your thoughts on the Ideas section’s special report on using algorithms to plan school start times.

The topics that animate political debate today cannot be properly understood by the “isms” of yesterday.

Pirates were once welcomed with open arms — even in Puritan Boston.

Many Boston subway stations are in a state of disrepair. Some simple fixes would go a long way.

After some vague reasons, a report on happiness itself has been retracted.

Turtles outlived the dinosaurs, but can they withstand humans?

Subjects of a California study made better-than-chance judgments about whether pols had been convicted of corruption.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

Even without gadgets, humans have a sense of when things happened and in which order. Scientists now think they know why.

Join the Ideas team and Harvard Business School professor David A. Moss for an interactive discussion of a pivotal moment in our history.

Decades into the fight against obesity, Americans still view surgical treatments with suspicion. But why? An abundance of food unprecedented in human history justifies aggressive measures.

In 1915, new creature comforts created by technology merged with the back-to-nature movement.

Congress was surprisingly violent in the years leading up to the Civil War. What’s that say about our own era of incivility?

From the Washington G-Men to the Heartland Patriots, how will your favorite team fare?

In an unusual twist, the society was asked to share its views on climate change.

New findings push the earliest known evidence of cheese-making back thousands of years.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

Complex views of gender go back further than many people think.

In an era before mass commercialization, it wasn’t easy to present new products to the public; the public had to travel to them. A forward-looking city could reap the benefits.