Articles

’Tis the season to give gifts that make a difference

Sure, you can buy your uncle a necktie that he won’t wear, or your niece an Amazon certificate that she’ll forget to use. Or you can help remove shrapnel from an injured child in Syria, or assist students at risk of genocide in South Sudan. The major aid organizations have special catalogs this time of […]

Read More

Preschool: building children’s brains

First, a quiz: What’s the most common “vegetable” eaten by American toddlers? Answer: The french fry. The same study that unearthed that nutritional tragedy also found that on any given day, almost half of American toddlers drink soda or similar drinks. But for many kids, the problems start even earlier. In West Virginia, one study […]

Read More

Candidates’ silence on women’s health troubling

What if we talked about gun violence, and discussed only bullet size? To me, that seems akin to the presidential campaign discussion of women’s health. Somehow, in nine Democratic debates, not a single question was asked about women’s health, and when the issue came up elsewhere it was often in the narrowest form, about abortion: […]

Read More

KRISTOF: Paying teachers more would be a bargain

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers—and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores).

Read More