The ways we talk about the future have been decidedly...darker over the past half century, a hard turn from the sunny optimism that informed most visions of the world to come for decades before that.

Early on, experts predicted about a million Americans would have cell phones by the turn of century. They were wrong. The actual number was more than 100 times that estimate. NPR's Wendy Kaufman ...

Worry over America’s recent economic stagnation, however justified, shouldn’t obscure the fact that the American economy remains Number One in the world. The United States holds 4.5 percent of the ...