Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences

Five election takeaways

Stephanie Perry, executive director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and manager for exit polls at NBC News, shares her team’s top five exit-poll analyses to help explain what happened.

Kristen de Groot

Despite lower crime rates in 2020, risk of victimization grew

Research out of Penn and the Naval Postgraduate School found that early in the pandemic the possibility of getting robbed or assaulted in a public place in the U.S. jumped by 15% to 30%, a rate that has stayed elevated since.

Michele W. Berger

Want a good read? Check out these award-winning stories

From the opening of the Penn Medicine Pavilion to the intricacies of broadband expansion—read some recent Penn Today stories that won district awards from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Dee Patel

Brazil’s presidential election

Three experts share their thoughts on Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva’s defeat of right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, and what it means for Latin America’s largest democracy.

Kristen de Groot

Election Day 2022

In what is sure to be an historic election, Penn Today looks back at the stories it published in the months and days leading to the midterms. 

Kristen de Groot



In the News


Marketplace (NPR)

What did you do at work last week? Monitoring performance doesn’t improve it, expert says

Adam Grant of the Wharton School says that people do their best work when they’re given a chance to pursue autonomy, mastery, belonging, and purpose.

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Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

‘Marry or be fired’ and other global efforts to boost fertility

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the world population will peak in 2055, followed by a systematic decline at a rapid rate.

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Men’s Health

These two personality traits make you instantly more attractive, say studies of over 4,000 people

A study by postdoc Natalia Kononov of the Wharton School suggests that kindness and helpfulness can make someone more attractive, regardless of the situation or relationship.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

After years of anti-vaccine advocacy, RFK Jr. said vaccines protect children. But experts say he must go further amid measles outbreak

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Jessica McDonald of APPC’s Factcheck.org comment on the need to debunk vaccine misinformation in public health messaging.

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The Guardian

Formerly anti-vax parents on how they changed their minds: ‘I really made a mistake’

According to surveys from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the proportion of respondents who believe vaccines are unsafe grew from 9% in April 2021 to 16% in the fall of 2023.

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