The financial recovery is happening very, very gradually, and the Federal Reserve's policy-making committee predicted in June that without any changes in the organization’s behavior, unemployment would decrease by only a small margin in the second half of the year if, in fact, it decreases at all. 

When London was preparing for the Olympics amidst the global recession, London’s Olympic Committee wanted a new kind of facility, an arena that could be completely transformed after the Games. And that was the challenge facing architect Rod Sheard, when his firm, Populous, was commissioned to design a 'temporary' Olympic stadium.

Here are two words we don’t see too often in Washington these days: “Bipartisan agreement.” Congressional leaders reached one of those yesterday to fund the federal government for the next six months — and they did it two months ahead of time. 

In September, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a proposal to reduce the minimum apartment size to 150 square feet. Will 'spacious' and 'urban' soon be completely mutually exclusive?

It’s been three days since the power failure began in India, and the outage has grown into the largest ever. So what determines whether or not a power grid works or fails? Could what happened in India happen to us?

Andrew Hacker, professor of political science at Queens College New York, recently proclaimed on The Takeaway that the age old belief that "algebra and mathematics generally sharpens our mind…[is] total fiction." Many of our listeners disagreed.

Few embraced their place in American culture with such passion and relish. Gore Vidal was the ultimate man of letters who once said "There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

It looks like the United States has its first gymnastics dream team since the “Magnificent Seven” in 1996. Dominique Moceano, the youngest member of the “Magnificent Seven” shares her thoughts on this year’s team, and takes a closer look at this year’s highlights. 

Eight Olympic badminton players have been disqualified from the Olympics for trying to lose. The ruling came this morning after three teams "adjusted" to a change in the Olympic rules that provided an incentive for players to lose strategically.

There is an 82 percent accuracy rate when the S&P stocks rise in an election year, the incumbent President wins, and if prices fall he will lose. Charlie Herman, business and economics editor for WNYC, joins the show to discuss how market numbers seem to influence voters.