Lawsuit settlement upends decades-long real estate policies that helped inflate agent commissions
A powerful real estate trade group has agreed to do away with policies that for decades helped set agent commissions, moving to resolve lawsuits that claim the rules have forced people to pay artificially inflated costs to sell their homes. Under the terms of the...
Poorest Americans: State Medicaid offices target homes of dead people to recoup health care costs
As Salvatore LoGrande fought cancer and all the pain that came with it, his daughters promised to keep him in the white, pitched roof house he worked so hard to buy all those decades ago. So, Sandy LoGrande thought it was a mistake when, a year after her...
Changes to noncompete clauses and overtime pay for salaried workers come as rebuke of corporate greed
For millions of American workers, the federal government took two actions this week that could bestow potentially far-reaching benefits. In one move, the Federal Trade Commission voted to ban noncompete agreements, which bar millions of workers from leaving their...
Life in a ghost town: Why people stay in their homes long after the local economy has collapsed
By Amanda McMillan Lequieu, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology, Drexel University It was midday on a Saturday, and Simonetta led me from the open front door of her home in southeast Chicago to her sitting room and settled next to her husband, Christopher,...
Before backyard barbecues: The history of Labor Day on the 130th anniversary of the holiday
From barbecues to getaways to shopping the sales, many people across the U.S. mark Labor Day, the federal holiday celebrating the American worker, by finding ways to relax. This year is the 130th anniversary of the holiday, which is celebrated on the first Monday of...
The debate over pennies: Why Americans leave a huge chunk of change at airport security checkpoints
By Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University Should the U.S. get rid of pennies, nickels and dimes? The debate has gone on for years. Many people argue for keeping coins on the grounds of economic fairness. Others call...
How FDR changed the Federal government with the Social Security Act to help generations of Americans
In August of 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently...
Musk’s X tries to supplement its toxic hate speech with user posts featuring adult pornographic content
The beleaguered social media platform X said it would formally allow people to show consensual adult pornographic content, as long as it is clearly labeled as such. The move made official a policy already in place when the platform was known as Twitter, before...
Identity development: How living in the public sphere of social media damages the well-being of children
By Rachael Sharman, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast Over recent months, a number of politicians have supported calls to ban social media for children under 16. Currently, kids under 13 are not allowed to use social media. There is some...
Souls of ancestors: Cambodia welcomes repatriated statues looted over decades of turmoil
The recent return to Cambodia of 14 sculptures that had been looted from the country during a period of war and unrest was like welcoming home the souls of ancestors, Cambodia’s culture minister said. The items repatriated from New York’s Metropolitan...
Fear of the water: How a menacing monster in the movie “Jaws” inspired a generation of shark scientists
By Gavin Naylor, Director of Florida Program for Shark Research, University of Florida Human fear of sharks has deep roots. Written works and art from the ancient world contain references to sharks preying on sailors as early as the eighth century B.C.E. Relayed back...
Just reporting news: Why America’s mainstream media has failed to defend democracy against Trump
Donald Trump and many of his supporters have explicitly promised to overturn American democracy, using Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” Hungarian model where the press is controlled, political opposition sidelined or imprisoned, and oligarchs run the government as...
