In her book Father Time, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explores the role males play in parental care and its evolutionary basis. Now, the book has inspired a 52-minute documentary called Father Time: Why Men Are Born to Nurture.
Why do some events catch fire in the news, producing a media storm, while many similar events go all but unnoticed? This Element uses a fire triangle analogy to explain the necessary conditions of media storms. The “heat” is the spark: a dramatic event or discovery.
What happens when “efficiency” comes at the expense of people? In his new book, American Carnage, Journalist and UC Davis Writing Center lecturer Sasha Abramsky examines the human cost of DOGE cuts during the second Trump administration. From lost healthcare to erased pensions, Abramsky focuses on the lived experiences behind policy decisions and reflects on empathy, free speech and the state of journalism today.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a global crisis that showed the fragility of democracy in Taiwan, where misinformation threatened the three pillars that define the nation’s government and civil society.
American Carnage is the first book-length reckoning with the consequences of Donald Trump’s war on the so-called "deep state," told through the experiences of 11 fired federal workers as their lives are thrown into chaos.
To provoke outrage is the point of rage bait. Research in communication is starting to explain how rage bait hacks the way our brains decide what we choose to read, watch and even click and swipe online. What’s more, the worse we feel, the more we seem to prefer it.
Mass shootings in white-majority neighborhoods received roughly twice the news coverage of mass shootings in neighborhoods where a majority of residents were people of color, while coverage of police-involved shootings was disproportionately high in majority-minority communities, according to new research in linguistics.
A new review paper from the Center for Mind and Brain suggests that a person’s environment in early childhood has much more to do with how they engage executive function — like exerting self-control — throughout their lives than innate ability.
The U.S. poverty rate puts a number on the share of households who struggle to make ends meet. The way we measure poverty dates back to the 1960s and provides a starting point for building an effective safety net that lifts people out of poverty.
Imagine a virtual space in which an AI instructor effectively guides students through an interactive lesson plan, like building an electronic circuit. Students in remote locations or who need extra stimulation can receive instruction from a virtual agent that can meaningfully communicate with them using verbal and nonverbal methods. This is what Michael Neff is doing in his lab at UC Davis.
