South Carolina Student Was Arrested for 'Disturbing a School' When She Challenged Police Abuse, So We Sued.

The root cause of this abuse was the presence of a thug in the school. That's where we have to fix it.

Implementing Obama's medical coverage law in Kentucky improved health care for people in that state. Now an extremist Republican governor wants to make things worse again.

All consequences considered, organic farming can be more sustainable than conventional.

Since many of the benefits are long-term and for society as a whole, rather than for the farm in the short term, it is rational to pay organic farms a certain subsidy for providing them. That would help them increase and replace the farms that degrade the environment more.

But we should also work hard to encourage fewer births, around the world. A population of 9 billion humans is not inevitable.

People in the Florida keys distrust and oppose the plan to wipe out Aedes aegypti mosquitoes locally with an experimental gene drive.

Using gene drive to wipe out a noxious species is potentially very useful. It also carries imponderable risks, which might be small, but it is not clear that we have done enough to be sure that is true. I don't know whether we are ready to try the technique in the wild.

We could reduce these risks by including a way to deactivate the gene drive. Here's one idea: make it depend on a promoter that detects the presence of some harmless but unusual chemical which will disappear from the the environment in a few weeks or months. We could strew that around the experimental area, and continue providing it for as long as needed, but stop if anything goes wrong.

The US needs a national debate about austerity. A debate between Clinton and Trump won't do the job.