How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups sh...

Huge swaths of the web are vanishing. What does that do to our culture?

Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:

Although considerable research has examined how members of advantaged groups think and feel about disadvantaged groups, fewer studies have examined responses to “intermediate” social groups—groups th....

A platform for celebrating the diverse ways that creatives practice feminism in the built environment.

Every day, officers working at international airports investigate potential risks to state safety and security. But how do they decide who they can trust, and also ensure that the broader public trus...

They didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened.

“Information is physical,” Melvin Vopson tells me. “The fact that information is physical goes back to much older studies. What I did in 2019, I asked myself a question: If a bit of information is physical, and you can detect that energy associated with the bit of information when you erase it, what happens to that energy when the information is at rest, at equilibrium, stored? Where is that energy going? And the only conclusion I could come up with is that that energy condenses into a small mass.”

Despite the narrative of a globalized economy, there is no effectively working global payment system. Although there is an infrastructure that allows the transmission of data about global payments,...