Society & Politics

If you gathered every American with a prison record into one contiguous territory and admitted it to the union, you would create the 12th-largest state. It would be home to at least 7 million to 8 million people and hold a dozen votes in the Electoral College.... Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced uncertainty, fear, and an unparalleled economic shock, resulting in the most extensive government stimulus package—totaling $2.9 trillion—in U.S. history. According to a new study, those stimulus checks more often went to the corporations that engaged in politics the most.... Read more

Like so many sectors of the economy, the news industry is hurtling toward a future where artificial intelligence plays a major role — grappling with questions about how much the technology is used, what consumers should be told about it, whether anything can be done for the journalists who will... Read more

Yes or no? It's a simple question that now drives more than US$13 billion (£9.7 billion) a month on prediction markets—companies like Polymarket, PredictIt and Kalshi.... Read more

Mexico stands at a critical security crossroads following the confirmed death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the founder and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.... Read more

NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, mounting climate change impacts, and other crises in the 2020s, global food security has suffered and progress towards meeting SDG2 has lagged. Urgent action, backed... Read more

For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding restraints on the buildup of the largest nuclear forces on Earth. The New START treaty expired on Feb. 5, 2026, ending the last agreed limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces.... Read more

Messages intended to suppress votes can be precisely delivered to particularly vulnerable and consequential groups of people via social media and keep millions of them from casting ballots, according to a new study that is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout. A... Read more

Americans are less confident in U.S. elections than they were a year ago—Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. In a national survey from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections (CTTE) at the University of California San Diego, produced in collaboration with the university's Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, 60%... Read more

Certain markers of high status may more strongly boost attitudes toward women versus men, and low status markers may more strongly worsen attitudes toward men versus women—with both findings more pronounced in countries with more conservative gender norms. Marie Isabelle Weißflog of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, and the University of York,... Read more

While there are plenty of historical topics U.S. citizens agree on—generally, events and figures from the Civil War up to the end of the Cold War—the birth of the nation isn't one of them, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute and a nonprofit called Millions... Read more

Thousands of people were killed by Iranian security forces in days of protests in January 2026. Meanwhile, in the same month, the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis shone a light on the use of fatal force by American law enforcement—a phenomenon that in 2025 saw the deaths of more... Read more

Chinese chatbots may be censored by the state, according to a study published in PNAS Nexus. China has a robust program of censorship and all China-originating LLMs must be approved by the Chinese government before release.... Read more

A new pilot study examining how immigrant residents engage with city services and government processes in Long Beach suggests that heightened federal immigration enforcement is undermining democratic participation, even among U.S. citizens who fear for undocumented family members.... Read more

The Swiss job market is a popular location for workers from outside the country. At the end of 2024, the Swiss Federal Statistical Office reported about 400,000 cross-border commuters in Switzerland—that is, people who live outside the country and commute to work in Switzerland. By contrast, there are about 1.9... Read more