Hear why one author thinks college rankings may be irrelevant

Some educators argue society's obsession with colleges at the top of rankings has hurt the US higher education ecosystem

Why are "good colleges" often the ones that accept the fewest students? Speaker Cecilia Orphan argues that society's obsession with colleges that are often private, expensive, and that reject applicants with high frequency has done harm. Instead, she argues, we should focus on regional public universities that meet the needs of students in a cost-achievable manner.

The future of higher education in the US

In this episode of Wired’s Have a Nice Future podcast, education journalist Paul Tough joins hosts Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode to tackle a big question: Is attending college in the United States still worth it? As tuition climbs and the payoff feels murkier, they dig into what’s broken in higher education, and whether it can be fixed.

Why donors love to give to the wealthy schools

In this podcast episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell explores why Hank Rowan’s $100 million gift to a small New Jersey college didn’t inspire others to support underfunded schools. Instead, donors continue to flock to elite institutions like Harvard and Stanford. “My Little Hundred Million” examines ways ideology and prestige have reshaped educational giving.

Some critics say comparing chart rankings across decades is meaningless

Although Billboard’s charts are presented as objective measures of a given song’s popularity, the company’s changing methodology (alongside changes in technology and listener habits) has made weighing chart success from different eras an imperfect science.

Ranking the most popular undergraduate degrees of the last decade

Roughly 2 million Bachelor's degrees are awarded by colleges and universities in the US every year, but within that number there are big shifts in the popularity and decline of certain majors. This data visualization breaks down the biggest gainers...

See US News’ most recent business school ranking

Although Harvard is often cited as the most prestigious MBA program in the US (given that it is considered to have pioneered the modern version of the MBA), US News ranked the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton as 2025’s best business school.

How March Madness bracketology became a national obsession

An estimated 60 million people fill out March Madness brackets yearly, despite a one in 9.2 quintillion chance of filling it out perfectly. This Smithsonian magazine article explores how UCLA's dominance in the 1960s and '70s made brackets boring and predictable, and how the expansion to 64 teams and putting games on TV played a huge role in popularizing March Madness brackets.

Before the BCS and Playoff systems, polls often sparked controversy over college football champions

For decades, national titles were awarded by polls like the AP and Coaches’ rankings—leading to split championships, heated debates, and disputed claims whenever top teams finished with identical records.

Ranking life's biggest decisions

Psychological research presents some unsurprising wisdom about how to make big decisions without regret: focus on people, don’t miss opportunities, and stay true to yourself.

The Nobel Prize remains science's top honor despite limits and inequities

Each October, a few scientists gain global fame when told they’ve won a Nobel Prize—a century-old award founded by Alfred Nobel to recognize major achievements. While the prizes boost attention and prestige for winners, they exclude many deserving scientists due to rigid rules.

Reader's Digest ranks the 100 best book of all time

Reader's Digest, first published in 1922 and ultimately becoming the most widely read periodical on the planet, created a list of the 100 best books of all time, compiling a list across genre, period, and form. The list includes classics,...

Why school boards ban dystopian books

Journalist Ali Velshi analyzes the lasting appeal of Lois Lowry’s "The Giver" and George Orwell’s "1984," two dystopian novels that have courted controversy since their publications. Beyond his interpretations, though, Velshi wants to understand why school boards perennially ban these books—and what makes them so fascinating for adolescent readers. In his search, he talks to Lowry about the lasting influence of her novel and to Orwell expert James McCallister about the prescient political portrait in "1984."

'It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.'

- Author Malcolm Gladwell (1963 - present)

Why the Myers-Briggs test is pure entertainment

The world's most popular personality test isn't used by academic psychologists—but hundreds of companies and thousands of colleges use it to place workers and students. Here's why it's so popular and likely overused.

Listen to the methods and strategy of the secretive S&P 500 selection committee

Stocks are added to the S&P 500 by a secret selection committee that meets regularly to assess which companies can remain in the index, which companies need to be added, and which companies no longer meet the criteria. The members of the committee used to be public, but S&P Global decided to keep its members confidential after companies sent packages, letters, and gifts to try to make it into the index.

Read why the information Americans have about our tax system might be misleading

For many, filing taxes can be complicated and overwhelming. Some argue that the tax system obscures certain aspects of the US tax code, making it difficult for taxpayers to accurately assess potential reforms.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Check out America's happiest places to live

Where are the best overall places to live in the US? This list focused on finding the happiest towns in America, given the ongoing reconsideration of how people want to live and work in the post-pandemic world. The selection process involved...

Read more about Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel's political beliefs and activity

At Stanford University, Thiel founded "The Stanford Review," a libertarian magazine dedicated to being against "political correctness." Since then, Thiel has railed against American universities as failing institutions, given lectures about the coming of the Antichrist, and donated money to high-profile political campaigns (including those of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance).

In 2008, one writer demonstrated the fickle nature of wine reviews

Robin Goldstein submitted a fake restaurant to the well-respected Wine Spectator for a competition. He created a website for the fake Milan-based business, complete with a menu of wines the magazine itself had disparaged. That didn't stop Wine Spectator from naming Goldstein's ruse among that year's winners.

How PageRank—Google's search algorithm—mimics academic citation analysis

Just as research papers carry more weight if they are cited more often and cite major papers to reach their conclusion, Google's PageRank identifies search relevance based on the number and quality of links pointing to a page.

The world's most (and least) corrupt countries

The annual index measuring every country's relative levels of corruption. In 2022, Denmark earned the top spot for transparency, with Sudan, Syria, and Somalia identified as having the highest levels of corruption in the public sector. The rankings...

How much power does the Federal Reserve really have?

Although mechanisms for transparency exist, it wouldn’t be difficult for the incredibly powerful institution to go rogue in the wrong hands. In this podcast episode, analysts game out how such a scenario would go.

Experts suggest where the UN should be reformed

In 2020, as the United Nations marked its 75th anniversary, the Council on Foreign Relations' Council of Councils published a collection of expert essays proposing reforms to enhance the UN's relevance. This collection of essays is a thought-provoking look at the UN's future.

How to read the news on TikTok

There's plenty of news on TikTok, but that doesn't mean it's all reliable. This guide, written by a communication technology professor, breaks down the ways the app's algorithm delivers news. It also covers how users can determine whether or not a story is factual or misleading. Most strikingly, the professor warns readers that if they didn't search for a TikTok video, then "it probably found you."

25 things you might not know about ‘Harry Potter,’ from John Green

John Green runs through 25 lesser-known facts about “Harry Potter”—like how JK Rowling was the first person to become a billionaire solely by being an author.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

The United States is one of only around two dozen countries with a fully federal system of government, in which power is divided between national and state governments.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.