In her first book, The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler uncovers a history of the imagination in medicine. Literature, she demonstrates, was an essential tool for this work in the 18th and 19th centuries, helping doctors craft medical theories. Reading and writing poetry, novels, and plays trained judgment, sharpened observation, and provided evidence for medical research….
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Dog lovers agree: Round and fluffy, wrinkled and snub-nosed, or skinny and sleek, dogs are cute. The question is, how does a group of canine aficionados come to a fair consensus about which wet nose and wagging tail evokes the loudest “awww!”? A group of students at Northeastern has spent the semester trying to find…
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They’re traveling to South Korea, Germany, Spain, and beyond. They’re serving underrepresented populations, searching for answers to some of the most vexing diseases, and fighting for gender equality. They’re Northeastern’s Truman Scholars and Fulbright Scholars. It’s a record-breaking year for academic honorees at Northeastern. The university boasts two Truman Scholars in a year when more…
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Emma Fridel’s research has uncovered that school shootings have been declining since the 1990s. She has also discovered that people who live in economically disadvantaged areas are less likely to take their own life after they kill somebody they know. And her work has revealed that between 2015-2017, there was an uptick in romantic partners…
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Ask David Lazer what he thinks about the current state of American democracy, and he’ll show you a picture of a burning dumpster. He can tell you why: Polarization is on the rise, trust in the news media is down, and the disparity between rich and poor has intensified. But unlike some, when Lazer peers into the…
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With yet another extension on Brexit, it’s clear that there’s extreme internal turmoil within the United Kingdom’s government. But it’s only serving to make the bond among the 27 other member states in the European Union stronger, says Northeastern political science professor Mai’a Cross. “Brexit, if anything, has solidified a sense of commonality among the other E.U. member-states. It’s confirmation that…
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Forty years ago, a researcher made a shocking discovery about a Massachusetts program designed to prevent crime among young people who lived in urban areas. It had achieved the opposite result. Those who received counseling, mentoring, and other services intended to steer them away from a life of crime were found, years later, to have…
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Since the early 1990s, the number of murders had been steadily dropping. Then in 2015, it jumped up, and it continued escalating in 2016 before falling again. What happened? Were those figures an aberration, or are they a worrisome sign of an upward trend? The latest research paper of Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox draws a number…
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Algorithmic predictions are ubiquitous these days—think of Amazon recommending a book based on past purchases. More controversial use arises when algorithms incorporate not just personal history, but information about people generally, blurring the lines of personal causation and broad, population-level trends. More and more decisions are made using machine learning algorithms, which, in theory, can…
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Northeastern will host a series of events next week in remembrance of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and to bring awareness in order to help prevent future genocides. Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week, which runs April 1-5, continues the university’s annual tradition of remembering the Holocaust, and reflecting on its significance and…
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