The 10,000 residents of Flat Rock, Michigan, are cheerful lately — you might even say optimistic. Fifteen new businesses have opened in the past year, including Blue Heron Trading Company, a candle-scented gift shop selling local jams and jellies, and a Burger King franchise directly across the street from the Ford Motor Company assembly plant, […]
John Hinckley Left the Mental Hospital Seven Months Ago
At 2:30 on Saturday afternoon, September 10, a hired SUV pulled up to the curb of a low-slung brick-and-wood house in suburban Virginia and let a passenger out. The man, who wore a tan baseball cap and a black T-shirt, did not glance at the paparazzi lenses trained on him but walked straight inside. He […]
Don’t Tell Me I “Look Good”
Don’t bother telling me how good I look, because I know what you really mean. For my age, you mean. Face it: To tell a woman over 50 that she “looks good” is condescending, like telling a 4-year-old that she’s “so big” or a dog that he’s “so smart.” It’s a compliment that contains an […]
An Experiment in Empathy
He auctioned off the pistol that killed Trayvon Martin. She watched her child die in a mass shooting. Can they change each other’s minds about guns? On his recent trip to New York, Todd Underwood did not pack a gun. This was unusual, the first time in five years that he went anywhere, even […]
My Daughter Grew Up Believing She Could Do Anything
Our 12-year-old daughter, Josephine, found an interactive electoral map online, and on Election Night she was settled on the couch, snuggled in an old fleece blanket, watching TV with the map booted up in her lap. Earlier in the evening, we had dinner with friends, and she had been manic with excitement, running laps around […]
Laurene Powell Jobs’s $100 Million Mission to Disrupt American High School
Since 2001, about $15 billion has been spent by taxpayers and philanthropists trying to boost academic achievement in American public schools. These efforts have largely failed — especially in high school. For the average 17-year-old, reading and math scores have not budged since 1971. On standardized tests, white 17-year-olds still outscore black 17-year-olds by 20 […]
The New Sandy Hook Elementary Is Meant to Be a Fresh Start, But It Still Evokes Tragedy
Since December 14, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut, has had a prickly relationship with the press. So many camera trucks swamped the narrow, hilly roads in the hours after the mass shooting there — where 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School were killed — that for weeks even longtime residents didn’t recognize their […]
The Last Days of “Miracle Boy”
The men are sweet when they talk to me, like boys eager to please the teacher. These are BMX riders — current and former, amateur and pro — mourning Dave Mirra, the Michael Jordan of their sport, who committed suicide in February. He sat in the cab of his truck near his home in Greenville, […]
From Zika to Trump: The Savvy Politics of Pope Francis
Pope Francis has had some week. Aboard the papal plane en route to Rome on Thursday, in response to a reporter’s question about the use of contraception to prevent the conception of children afflicted with deformities possibly linked to the Zika virus, he said this: “Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil.” What? What […]
How Smart Do You Have to Be to Raise a Child
The state said a 19-year-old with an intellectual disability wasn’t equipped to look after her baby and whisked the newborn off to another family just after birth—a decision the mother was ready to fight. But how smart do you have to be to raise a child? The young woman labored in the back […]
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