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Why Birth Control Matters for the American Dream
My TIME.com column today on birth control and the American dream: Melinda Gates was lauded for her bravery last week in stating her unequivocal support for contraception, especially for women in...
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How To Fix Our Schools!
Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine you have a really complicated surgical problem. Thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysm, let’s say. Just a little bulge in the body’s major vessel that extends from the...
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Why Children Need Play
This is the best-ever reason children should be encouraged to play! Read the whole article, “All Work and No Play Make the Baining the Dullest Culture on Earth“ here, but the summary is that the...
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Flight of Imagination
I had dinner with a British acquaintance many years ago who demanded to know – after putting back several drinks – “why such stupid people can be so successful.” Nobody could work out how Americans...
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To Want “But Little”: Reflections from a Second Grade Classroom
“My greatest skill in life was wanting but little.” -Henry David Thoreau Here’s an old journal entry I wrote when I was student-teaching in a second grade class with Mehrnoosh Watson, a master...
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Monkey See, Monkey Do
It’s mid-October, so it must be Get Rid of Monkey Bars! season. As an early childhood educator, I know the drill. Monkey bars are so retro (not in a fun way). Monkey bars are the scourge of the...
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Forest for the Trees
I’ve been taking long walks with my dog around Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge MA. It’s a surprisingly wild spot for a city park. A friend once fell into a swamp there and had to claw his way out...
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The Music of a Free Society
“We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can...
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Suffer the Children
Are there any new words for the grief and fear we feel for those Connecticut school children and their families? I’m rarely at a loss for words, but I have nothing to offer those desperate parents...
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Use Your Words
Words are supposed to hurt. That’s considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence. Words are supposed to be free so...
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Race to Somewhere
An open letter to my students at Harvard: Some of you are upset with me for writing a piece at Cognoscenti in which I questioned the value of our punishing, sometimes brutalizing “race to the top”...
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How To Reduce Sports-Related Violence: Make Teens the Referees
My TIME.com post today on how we can better foster responsibility in teens (and reduce violence at high school sports events): put the kids in charge. Here’s my case: It’s often said that team sports...
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College Sex: 50 Shades of Black and White
A few days ago, I wrote a TIME.com column arguing that allegations of sexual assault on college campuses are hard to adjudicate (and even harder to prosecute) because, unfortunately, these cases often...
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Mind the Gap: How Education Inequality Holds Us Back
My post at WBUR’s Cognoscenti: The achievement gap is more than a symptom of growing inequality in the United States — it’s one of the causes as well. Inequality is rising on many fronts in the United...
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