Ben Gottlieb

The AP's Pulitzer-winning series focused on the New York Police Department's secret monitoring of Muslim communities, and The Takeaway has followed this story since the AP began its s...

Latino and Hispanic: they're terms that a lot of Americans are asked to choose between when identifying themselves on the census, in official paperwork, and in everyday conversation. But according to a new poll by the Pew Hispanic Center, most adults of Latin American descent prefer not to use either. Instead, the respondents said they preferred to identify themselves by their country of origin.

The United States has just over 300 million people. If you break that down to a biological level, that equals about 13.8 billion human chromosomes, and at least 90 trillion human gene...

President Obama announced a crackdown on manipulation and speculation in the oil markets, calling for more government oversight of the oil markets, including increased funding and sta...

Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Ins...

In the news, Sharia law is frequently depicted as a system that condones women being stoned. In the movies, it’s the reason why petty thieves find their hands on the chopping block. B...

Today marks five years since Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and injured 25 others at Virginia Tech, making it the deadliest American shooting in history. Heavy media coverage has depi...

The 2012 Masters Golf Tournament at the all-male Augusta National Golf Club, which began Thursday, has sparked discussion about sexism and the legal rights of private organizations. T...

The baseball season began just over a week ago with the Mariners and the Athletics facing off at the Tokyo Dome. But there remains a long way to go before the season ends in October, ...

Popular science is more popular than ever. Its subjects also seem more rarefied than ever: string theory, theoretical physics, theoretical astrophysics. Whatever happened to the more ...

Tag Challenge is a worldwide social media manhunt taking place on March 31. Real people will act as the five thieves, and teams must use social media to track them down using nothing ...

According to our partner the BBC, security officials seized 11 suicide bomb jackets and made several arrests inside a security zone around the Ministry of Defense in Afghanistan's cap...

On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and the CIA. It marked the end of one of the...

The biographical campaign film has a long and proud place in U.S. political theater: from 1952's "The Man from Abilene," about Eisenhower, to 1992's "The Man from Hope," about Bill Clinton, these films have become an essential part of the campaign season. They not only try to appeal to voters' political concerns, they also try to cement in their minds an impression of the candidates' personalities.

The Obama campaign released a 17-minute documentary-style film last night called "The Road We've Traveled." It's narrated by Tom Hanks and directed by David Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth." What does it have to offer, politically and cinematically?

This Sunday marks three months since the last U.S. military convoy left Iraq. Few places were better witnesses of the effects of the war on citizens than Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which is perhaps most familiar to Americans for its emergency room, known as Baghdad ER. Each day, the American-run Baghdad ER treated anyone who came to its door with life-threatening battle injuries. On October 1, 2009, the U.S. government returned management of the hospital to Iraq.

In poet Kevin Young's new book, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness," Young offers a remarkable, encyclopedic essay on the history of African-American culture. Young explores how African-American culture and American culture have affected one another. The book, part prose and part essay, also explores how African-American culture has become an essential and inextricable part of American culture.

We’re still feeling the effects of the housing crisis, and one of the places it’s affecting Americans most is in the cost of housing. Housing and the economy — and particularly how lower income families are coping with the crisis — will continue to be a central part of the debate going into the general election. But are we having the right discussion about housing prices? How do the on-the-ground effects of the crisis affect the economy, and what can be done about them?

There are at least 100 reports of acid attacks in Pakistan each year, and they're overwhelmingly against women. This figure only accounts for the reported cases — it’s assumed that many more go unreported.

The Academy Award-winning documentary short film "Saving Face" looks at this phenomenon through the experiences of three people: Zakia, a 39-year-old woman whose husband threw acid on her after she filed for divorce; Rukhasana, a 23-year-old woman who was attacked by her husband and his family; and Dr. Mohammad Jawad, a plastic surgeon dedicated to healing the faces of the injured women.

Four months before President Obama was sworn into office, the investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, setting off a panic throughout the country and much of the world. Coming on the heels of the bank bailout and the subprime mortgage crisis, President Obama's primary focus became the economy. One of the major questions facing his administration now is how well Obama and his team handled the fallout after the economic crash.

Religion plays a fundamental role in daily life, and in political life, to believers and non-believers both. And while wars have been fought and era-defining antagonisms built for centuries between opposing religions, the relatively recent antagonism between believers and non-believers has reached something of a fever pitch. You can trace it to the Enlightenment, but the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have brought the argument to a head … or maybe to a standstill. Is any kind of progress possible in a debate between religious-believers and atheists? Or is there just a never-breakable impasse between the two worldviews?