Last week, a gallon of gas at an Exxon station in the tony suburb of Bethesda cost $2.99.

Let's say there are 10 houses on your street and a giant pothole develops right in the middle of the block. Everyone benefits if the pothole gets fixed, but that might require multiple calls to municipal authorities and a lot of hassle. Since every resident benefits even if he or she does nothing...

When Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman dived into the world of the white-gloved workers who open the front doors of expensive New York apartment buildings, he found that most people who applied for jobs as doormen never got one. Most doormen, however, had not applied for their jobs.

With just over five minutes to play in yesterday's game against the New York Jets, the Washington Redskins found themselves on their own 23-yard line facing a fourth and one. The team, which was ahead by just three points, elected to do what teams normally do in such situations: They played it safe...

If you consult the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is democratically created by Internet users, you will see a pattern emerge in the phrases used to describe the first female leaders of many countries.

What do the war in Iraq, your Christmas shopping and this week's Thanksgiving dinner have in common?

In the interest of promoting democracy, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently announced that he had to lock up most of his country's democracy activists. And because he wanted the Pakistani Supreme Court to independently rule on whether he could continue as president, Musharraf also...

Forget about buying low and selling high. If you are worried about the recent volatility in the stock market, perhaps you should let the weather be your guide.

Social psychologist William B. Swann once had a group of married people evaluate their spouses even as their spouses evaluated them. People with high self-esteem, the psychologist found, felt closer to their partners when they received positive evaluations. People with low self-esteem, however, felt...

Nearly four decades ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram had a volunteer stand stock still on a busy New York sidewalk and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too. When five volunteers were recruited to sky-gaze, nearly one in five passersby stopped to look up.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge . . . "Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been . . . "

Two sociologists and a mathematician recently conducted an experiment that provides an intriguing window into the presidential candidate selection that begins this week. Matthew Salganik, Duncan Watts and Peter Sheridan Dodds had a large group of people rate 48 songs. Based on these ratings, the...

According to conventional wisdom, front-runners win presidential nominations. Democrats and Republicans who start the race for a presidential nomination with the largest amount of money and the best poll numbers are supposed to be the ones most likely to walk away with victory months later.

Take a step back from the Republican and Democratic presidential primary races and you will see a sharp difference between the two.

Some years ago, a political scientist conducted an interesting experiment that speaks to the fractured race for the Republican presidential nomination, which now has six candidates, five issues, and four potential front-runners.

Mitt Romney wants to round up 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. John Edwards wants to put an end to lobbyists. All the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates rail against the ways of Washington.

What do you think is more dangerous? Terrorists getting their hands on a biological weapon that can be smuggled into the country or another hurricane like Katrina? Which is the smarter way to keep Social Security solvent? Raise the retirement age or raise taxes? How can the current economic crisi...

If you happen to stop by a Victoria's Secret store this Wednesday evening, on the eve of Valentine's Day, you will learn something fascinating about human nature that will tell you a lot about people and relationships.

Through much of the Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney could barely restrain their contempt for each other. During one Republican debate in New Hampshire in early January, McCain landed a zinger that summed up Romney's opportunistic...

John McCain once called televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," but now the Republican senator from Arizona is currying favor with social conservatives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) now opposes the Iraq war, although she used to support it. Sen. Barack Obama...

Sen. John McCain's quest for the Republican presidential nomination was once seen as dead, but like those robots in the "Terminator" movies that reassemble themselves after being blown to smithereens, he came back. Five years ago, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) was a virtually unknown African American ...

Climate change. Pollution. Financial expense. Our gas-guzzling ways have long been associated with a variety of problems, but disturbing evidence now points to a new dimension of our love affair with petroleum: Oil consumption and high oil prices hurt the political, social and economic development...

In Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal and tragicomic downfall, the question that bugged many people did not have to do with ethics or politics, but whether Spitzer got a raw deal.

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

On Oct. 10, 2002, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood in the Senate to explain why she was authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq: "In balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I...

About 25 years ago, Cass Sunstein opened a retirement account that had two portfolios. One was mostly bonds, the other mostly stocks. Like many academics who use the TIAA-CREF investment program, Sunstein divided his money equally between stocks and bonds.

If this were Britain, Russia or India, Rudy Giuliani '08 caps would not be on the clearance racks. In those countries, where bigwigs and insiders get to nominate party leaders, the former Republican front-runner and establishment favorite would have long ago been anointed the winner.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies/Too bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth's superb surprise . . .

Put yourself in the shoes of Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. You are widely seen by Democratic voters as a transformational presidential candidate. Democrats are nearly evenly divided between you and your competitor, and you think you are the best candidate for your party -- and...

On the eve of crucial presidential primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has found himself dogged by questions about his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. As the Democratic front-runner's popularity has suffered after public statements by Wright about ra...

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has half a dozen good reasons she thinks she is the best Democratic candidate for president. They are called Pennsylvania and Ohio, Arkansas and Nevada, New Jersey and New Mexico -- states she has won in the Democratic primary contest.

People hate Mondays. And they love Fridays. The Carpenters crooned about being blue in "Rainy Days and Mondays." The restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday's might restrict its clientele to workaholics if it were to rename itself T.G.I. Monday's.

One hundred forty-three years ago, women's suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton faced a conundrum: With the Civil War over, Stanton had to decide whether to support the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which enabled black men to vote -- at a time when white women such as herself...

The housing market is in free fall: Quick -- let's protect homeowners against foreclosure.

Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of "are-we-there-yet?" -- and the road rage of fellow drivers.

The United States is awash in gloom. Overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the country's economic direction, and the intensity of unhappiness is greater than it has been in 15 years, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. The answer, pundits, politicians...

Subprime mortgages have been linked to a meltdown in housing and questionable Wall Street practices, and they may have been the original domino that set off America's current economic crisis.

Seventeen years ago, a couple of criminologists at the University of Maryland published an interesting paper about the 1976 District ban on handguns -- a ban that was recently overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds it was inimical to the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms to p...

Among psychologists who study sports, there is a code word for parents who lose their temper standing on the sidelines of their children's soccer, baseball and football games: THOSE parents -- Tempestuous, Harried, Overwrought, Self-absorbed and Emotional.

In May, the baby-faced chief executive of IndyMac Bancorp, Michael Perry, lashed out at critics who said the bank was on weak footing: "Given the decline in our stock price, some people have questioned IndyMac's survivability in the current environment. I am here to tell you that I believe we hav...

It happens all the time: Two guys in a garage come up with a cool new technology -- and dream of making it big. A thousand people take time off work to campaign for a visionary politician because they feel they are doing something to change the world. A million kids hit baseballs -- and wonder what...

Days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden left his compound in Kandahar in Afghanistan and headed into the mountains. His driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, traveled with him. As U.S. and Northern Alliance forces stood poised to capture Kandahar a few months later, bin Laden told Hamdan t...

If American sprinters Tyson Gay and Walter Dix reprise their race in the U.S. Olympic trials at the Olympic finals in Beijing, you will see the athletes crouch low over the starting blocks. Gay's right foot will be in the rear position on the blocks; Dix prefers to have his left foot in the rear ...

Nearly a century ago, American middle-distance runner Abel Kiviat entered the Stockholm Olympics as the odds-on favorite to win the 1,500-meter race, an event in which he held the world record. Kiviat had the lead 1,492 meters into the race but was passed in the final eight meters by Britain's...

Consider these scenarios. Scandal A: A prominent politician gets caught sleeping with a campaign aide and plunges himself into an ugly paternity dispute -- all while his cancer-stricken wife is fighting for her life.

Political conventions, like all forms of public relations, carry the risk of whiplash. Last week in Denver, for example, Bill Clinton said Barack Obama "has a remarkable ability to inspire people, to raise our hopes and rally us to high purpose" -- all of which sounded a little different from the...

In the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with the twin towers vanished from Manhattan's skyline, a poem by W.H. Auden could have been the song of a wounded nation. "September 1, 1939," written on the eve of World War II, seemed eerily prescient:

Have you seen the photo of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin brandishing a rifle while wearing a U.S. flag bikini? Have you read the e-mail saying Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was sworn into the U.S. Senate with his hand placed on the Koran? Both are fabricated -- and...

With America divided right down the middle for the third presidential election in a row, most people would not be surprised to hear that Democratic and Republican partisans perceive a widening gap between their presidential choices. In 2004, for example, die-hards in both parties felt that the...