How can a shoe communicate many different messages at once?

The college admissions scandal exposed criminal and unethical actions that ...

Feel like visiting another star system or dimension? You can do this by traveling through a black hole.

A 1927 study by famed efficiency expert Lillian Moller Gilbreth revealed how American women dealt with menstruation -- and how they wished they could.

Are children’s drawings meaningless scribbles or serious creative work? Western scholars and child psychologists have debated this topic for years.

Orson S. Fowler thought houses without right angles would offer a better life, but his own architectural experiments did not end well.

Faced with a potential hostile takeover, companies may deploy a dramatic shareholder rights plan, colloquially known as a "poison pill."

The day-long Purim festival was transformed into a week-long carnival in the Dutch Caribbean colonies, as a rowdy celebration of inversion celebrated liberations of all kinds.

Some animals, when faced with predators, play dead instead of trying to escape. But for death-feigning to work, a lot of things have to go well.

For decades, bars excluded single women, claiming the crowds were too “rough” and “boisterous” and citing vague fears of “fallen girls.”

Is there an equation for happiness? And if so, can science really define it?

Berthe Morisot never became as famous as her counterparts Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, but her work has an important place in art history.

When government wouldn't fund female fieldwork, Agnes Chase pulled together her own resources.

Scholars, soldiers, and scientists have long puzzled over the supernatural substance.

Tea is a quintessential British product. And for that reason is bound up in the nation's history of colonial expansion. British tea drinkers preferred Chinese tea at first, and had to be convinced on…

An entrepreneur, hunter, woodsman, scientist, and artist — John James Audubon, famous for his epic The Birds of America, is a figure intimately associated with a certain idea of what it means to be…

Well-researched stories from NPR, The Cut, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

It's uniquely annoying to listen to one side of someone else's cellphone call. Our technology columnist examines why that is.

Gynandromorphy is an extremely rare condition in which an animal is half male and half female. It's most visible in birds and butterflies.

How important is a President's health? Should the public know all? History suggests that full disclosure is better than not.

The history of the Stamp Act as it celebrates its 250th anniversary.

This 1823 policy initially focused on preventing European colonization in the Americas. But different U.S. presidents have used it to mean different things.

Young children have a unique sense of the world that can be difficult for grown-up architects to grasp.

Catherine II ruled Russia for many years. She also wrote her own memoirs, in a time when such writing was considered inappropriate for a monarch.