Thursday night, the Republican candidates for president (minus one) gathered to debate the future of the country.

As a scholar of rhetoric and public address, what stood out to me was how closely the rhetoric of the candidates followed a well-established pattern for GOP rhetoric that dates back to the 1960s. Capitalizing on Americans’...

George Bernard Shaw in 1909.Bain Collection (Library of Congress), via Wikimedia Commons

One of the best-known indictments of the medical profession – which though over 100 years old still applies today – is found in the preface to George Bernard Shaw’s 1906 play, “The...

You may have heard news media and political rivals describe Donald Trump as a “demagogue” this presidential primary season.

Hillary Clinton used the term to describe Trump in a MSNBC interview:

That’s what a demagogue does: They say whatever they need to say to try to stir up the passions of people."

The term demagogue is...

Flint’s recent water crisis is a stinging reminder that the infrastructure we often take for granted has many vulnerabilities.

The crisis also underscores the complexity of providing communities with...

Like a zombie, the Milky Way galaxy may already be dead but it still keeps going. Our galactic neighbor Andromeda almost certainly expired a few billion years ago, but only recently started showing outward signs of its...

While Donald Trump continues to hold a commanding lead among Republicans in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination, National Review, the country’s leading conservative magazine, thinks otherwise.

In a special issue titled “Against Trump” last week, a strongly worded editorial denounced Trump as a “political...

The GOP candidates debate again tomorrow night.

Donald Trump reportedly won’t join them. His campaign has confirmed to various news outlets that he intends to skip the debate after losing a showdown with Fox News over Megyn Kelly’s role as moderator.

That doesn’t mean he won’t be drawing media attention with what he says and...

From October 2015 to January 2016, there were almost 4,000 cases of babies born with microcephaly in Brazil. Before then, there were just 150 cases per year.

The suspected culprit is a mosquito-borne virus called Zika. Officials in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and Jamaica have suggested that women delay becoming pregnant. And the Centers for...

Donald Trump has made exclusion a troubling touchpoint of his campaign, through his inflammatory proposal to block Muslim refugees or with the removal of a Muslim woman from one of his rallies.

Other Republican presidential hopefuls have also expressed anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments. Ted Cruz repeatedly refused to criticize Trump’s...

A friend once grumbled that, given the choice, she’d rather see her ex miserable than herself happy.

Few things in life are as traumatic as the end of a long-term, romantic relationship. Nonetheless, many people are able to eventually recover and move on...