Few ideas command more universal agreement than the belief that children must be protected. Across cultures, religions, and political traditions, they are regarded as uniquely deserving of care, safety, and opportunity. Yet a glaring contradiction emerges when we look closely at the conditions under which...

As the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency rapidly expands its carceral powers, immigrant detention centers around the United States have been facing relentless public scrutiny. It appears the pressure campaigns are finally having an impact as some centers are shutting down. While this...

Since the early 1990s, the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk, located on the Amur River, has steadily reemerged as one of Russia’s most important “border trade hubs.” Sitting directly across from the Chinese city of Heihe, migration for work, commerce, and education has become...

Phrases like “public benefit,” “impact,” “responsibility,” or “sustainability” are routinely used by universities, nonprofits, corporations, and public agencies to describe their work, summarizing complex activities in ways that are easy to communicate to donors, policymakers, journalists, and the public. ...

Taking an invention and claiming it as yours is called intellectual property, based on practices followed by US and European businesses. But what happens when your neighbor argues that inventions can’t be owned, and that intellectual property is no longer applicable based on the rules...

The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world. ...

In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was...

Sixty to seventy percent of Mexico’s terrain is classified as arid or semiarid desert, typically with no rain for eight to nine months a year. La pipa, the water truck, brings enough water to supply farms for a day or two at most. Meanwhile, 86...

Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on nectar, they are also performing one of the most important ecological services in arid landscapes: pollination. For agave...

Many consumers assume that food labeled organic is grown without pesticides. The reality is more nuanced. Organic farmers can and do use pesticides, but the types of pesticides they use, the circumstances under which they use them, and the regulatory standards governing their use differ...