A conversation with MIT professor and Peter Institute for International Economics senior fellow.

Twitter or no Twitter, our social networks are basically as small and close as they were in ancient Rome.

To succeed in business, you don’t want to be too densely interconnected with entities that resemble you—or too diffusely linked to entities that don’t resemble you.

Influencing tastes across social networks is a tricky business: a love of “Love Actually” spreads differently than a love of “Pulp Fiction.”

Social networks “magnify whatever they’re seeded with”—from germs to altruism to a diet of muffins and beer.

Like atoms in a molecule, we’re all linked together. Studying the complex matrix that results can illuminate everything from bucket brigades to Bernie Madoff.

The social networks we form add up to a giant “human superorganism.”

A conversation with the Harvard physician and social scientist.

Why has the “Life of Pi” author been sending novels to the Canadian prime minister?

What can be done to make boys and young men more interested in reading books?

When your novel gets a negative review, “it’s your entire being that is negated. And that hurts.” But you have to learn to let it go.

There’s no formula to writing. The key thing is simply to read, says the novelist. “The best teacher is a cheap, little Penguin classic.”

A tiny germ of an idea leads to research, which leads to further ideas and then more research. Eventually the writer has hundreds of pages of notes to work from.

Martel never bases his characters on real people—they’re always a vehicle for something he wants to express.

The major religions have all had their excesses, but there’s something about spiritual thinking that augments a life.

Allegorical fiction can take very complex realities and convey them in powerful, emotional, psychologically accurate way.

A conversation with the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist.

Josh Ritter can’t complain about today’s recording industry: the concerts are improving and some lesser-known artists are doing great work.

The developer of the first portable cellular telephone discovered that he wanted to be an engineer when he was just four years old. His homemade magnifying glass sparked a career […]

The pioneering HIV/AIDS researcher used high school math in creating a drug “cocktail” to combat the worldwide epidemic.

The mathematical physicist reflects upon his untraditional math and science education in Belize, and talks about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is a “profound connection” that can inspire young people.

The U.S. is now incarcerating on a level so out of sync with it’s own history—and with what other industrial democracies are doing—that the system is bound to change.

Sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of that in society as a whole.

The massive rise in the prison population isn’t one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.

We once hoped criminals would come out of prison better than they had entered. Not anymore.

Looking carefully at the history of Texas makes us rethink the history of crime and punishment and incarceration in the country as a whole.

Our skyrocketing incarceration rates are less related to crime than to racial politics, tough-on-crime rhetoric and for-profit prisons.

African-Americans are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. Intentional discrimination is a factor in this—as are poverty, educational attainment, urban density, and white flight from urban centers.

A conversation with the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire.”