Wake Forest News

The Washington Post

So long, penny. The Treasury has officially stopped producing one-cent coins.

The problem is, most of those pennies don’t actually, you know, circulate. They sit in piggy banks and car consoles, cash register drawers and gutters, said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University who since 2007 has led the charge among academics to ditch the penny. “Why do they get taken out of circulation? We won’t even waste our time to bring them back to the Coinstar or back to the grocery store,” Whaples said. “We won’t even reach down and pick up a penny we see on the sidewalk.”

Whaples shares more about the elimination of the penny on the WFU news experts page: “Why eliminating the penny makes sense.”

November 13, 2025

The Conversation

What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection

“Human beings have been thinking about time for as long as we have records of humans thinking about anything at all,” writes philosophy professor Adrian Bardon. “The passage of time is inextricably bound up with how humans represent our own experiences. Our picture of the world is inseparable from the conditions under which we, as perceivers and thinkers, experience and understand the world. Any description of reality we come up with will unavoidably be infused with our perspective.”
This story was also published in the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, Yahoo! and dozens of other national news outlets.

November 12, 2025