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 […]

Photo: Julie Blackmon The best government-pre-K classrooms don’t resemble remedial education designed to bring impoverished 3-year-olds up to speed; they look like the progressive places most rich Americans have been sending their kids to for generations. It’s easy to see why “universal pre-K” has become the calling card of so many Democratic politicians. Because, really, […]

Amid the hosannas and the traffic snarls that will accompany Pope Francis to America this week, amid all the gushing over the singular Argentine who has become, overnight, a moral voice for the entire world, a note of caution must be struck. There is one group that this pope — a protector of the poor […]

Amid the hosannas and the traffic snarls that will accompany Pope Francis to America this week, amid all the gushing over the singular Argentine who has become, overnight, a moral voice for the entire world, a note of caution must be struck. There is one group that this pope — a protector of the poor […]

From top: Morgan Geyser being questioned by detective Tom Casey, and Anissa Weier by detective Michelle Trussoni, in the Waukesha police station, May 31, 2014. If 12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser knew that the internet character they worshipped was a fantasy, why did they want to kill their friend for him? Video stills and […]

The form arrived in an email attachment on the Friday after winter break.“What is your race?”it asked. And then, beneath that, a Census-style list: “African-American/Black,” “Asian/Pacific Islander,” “Latina/o,” “Multi-racial,” “White,”   and “Not sure.” The email, signed by the principal of Fieldston Lower School, urged parents to talk about these categories with their children at home because the […]

In the past couple weeks, I have found my mind circling back, again and again, to an article I read in this magazine, about a Japanese tidying guru named Marie Kondo. Her idea, in a nutshell, is this: People should share the spaces they inhabit exclusively with objects — furniture, books, clothing, cooking pans, potted […]

What is it about the word “mom”? It makes me want to choke. Not when I hear it in my own house, uttered by my own child, in reference to me. In that case I love it — heedlessly, actually, as if this universal and mundane moniker were a pet name bestowed upon me by […]

It’s been five years since Sarah Palin appropriated the feminist label, inserting her own brand of womanhood — the gun-toting, abortion-rights-defying, libertarian kind — into the larger women’s movement, infuriating its leaders on the left. And earlier this week, legions of conservative stay-at-home mothers, the same or similar to those who back then claimed Palin […]

Over at The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has written a rather unhinged meditation on the prospects for gun control — on the “moral work” of pushing new gun laws, and presumably the moral complacency of those who fail to see a way to make them happen. Gopnik’s essay is prompted by the suit a number of the Newtown families recently […]