The Madam Next Door

There’s a small town in Idaho where prostitution was practiced openly—in effect, decriminalized. The practice was tolerated, even embraced, until 1991. Branstetter has been interviewing local residents, discovering who the madams were and what they did to cultivate widespread public acceptance of their work.

If you’ve ever had a coworker write nasty or demeaning emails, undermine your credibility, or give you the silent treatment, you’ve experienced workplace incivility. We look at how it affects the bottom line and whether it should be included in performance reviews.

As part of our ongoing series about STEM education, we ask: what does a scientist look like? Short, tall, black, brown, male or female?

We discuss why women and minorities continue to face barriers to entering STEM fields.

We also hear about what might be keeping American girls out of laboratories and the WWII history of Edna the Engineer.

In 2009, fewer than 2% of physical science degrees—like physics and chemistry—went to African-Americans. Considering African-Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population, these numbers are shockingly low. And they’re getting even lower.  We talk to four young scientists about their outreach project.