Is Tracy Flick real? I know she’s a fictional character, a gung-ho high schooler introduced in Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel Election and made famous by Reese Witherspoon in Alexander Payne’s 1999 movie. Ever since Witherspoon’s indelible performance, Tracy Flick has perched in the front row of the American cultural imagination, hand raised.

Johnny Depp has finally won his defamation case against Amber Heard. The jury decided that he proved Amber Heard intentionally defamed him with malice on every count and awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.

In 2012, feminist activist Silvia Federici wrote to dismantle much of what we know and hold dear: “Nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.”

Critics say that big-time donors wield too much power over their fellow-citizens and perpetuate social inequality. But don’t cancel Lady Bountiful just yet.

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

In the 21st century it's got harder to earn more than your parents and to climb the social ladder. What's gone wrong, and what can be done to change this?

Peach-colored bandages label dark-skinned patients as outside the norm, says med student Linda Oyesiku. Brown bandages expand who gets to be normal.

The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax.

Scientists have developed a blood test that can predict whether someone is at high risk of a heart attack, stroke, heart failure or dying from one of these conditions within the next four years. The test, which relies of measurements of proteins in the blood, has roughly twice the accuracy of existing risk scores. It could enable doctors to determine whether patients’ existing medications are working or whether they need additional drugs to reduce their risk.

The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report! The report measures happiness on three main factors—life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions.Let’s checkout the top 10 happiest nations in the world in 2022.

Fear of professional exile has kept Sarah Hepola from taking on certain topics. What gets lost when a writer mutes herself?

Bookangel launched a survey into author safety and privacy issues, such as online harassment, threats and physical confrontations. This was simply to find out how common these issues are, and what type of problems writers face. The results are shocking!

Although businesses haven't really reduced office space in the pandemic and some companies may be expecting workers to return soon, plenty of employees have become hooked on the work-from-home life.

Humans evolved to be interdependent, not self-sufficient

Nobody likes nepotism. It's one of those universally reviled practices in society. To be familiar with the word is to have a negative association with it. Nepotism refers to preferentially giving jobs and other favors to relatives or friends. Everyone is quick to call out nepotism when they see it, quick to belittle those who benefit from it and to cast aspersions on those who bestow it. It’s regarded as a form of corruption, a moral failing, and an impediment to progress. The problem is, nepotism’s many critics are full of shit — their antipathy poorly thought-out and mired in envy and hypocrisy.

People incarcerated as adolescents and teens are more likely to die at young age than the rest of the population, an analysis published Thursday by JAMA Network Open found. Those ages 11 to 21 years who previously served time in juvenile detention facilities have a nearly six-fold higher risk for early death compared with those who have not been incarcerated, the data showed.

The advent of the internet shifted how we socialise. Chat rooms, forums, and eventually social media platforms opened up new ways to both communicate and express ourselves. Online anonymity, for example, allowed us to be whoever we pleased to anyone with a connection — for better or worse. Psychological research followed this shift, and decades later there are troves of papers on almost every aspect of online interaction you could hope to explore.

For many of us, the last 20 months have flown by. Experts say that's because the monotony of pandemic life has robbed us of the unique experiences our brains use to make memories and track time.

By Emma Young. Exploiting the “maybe favour” effect could have big implications for society.

Sometimes individuals who survive a tragedy, such as a tsunami, report feeling guilty that they lived while innocent people close to them perished. Similarly, I have had some black professionals in post-apartheid South Africa tell me they feel guilty for having left their townships or villages and “made it” while their former neighbours still live in poverty.