A few years ago, Paul was in a dark place. His wife had left him, he’d lost his home and his dogs. His business had failed and two grandparents had died. He had heard of anxiety and depression but didn’t think they applied to him. “I thought I was just a miserable person who went through phases of not being myself, and I struggled to interact with people,” he said.
There’s a lot of evidence that social interaction matters to human happiness. Solitude and quiet may be en vogue amid the madness of modern life, but research consistently shows that people report feeling happier when they interact more with people than when they don’t.
A decade ago Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford, embarked on a slightly insane project to compile and standardize test scores from every public school in the US. Having that data, he and his colleagues thought, would reveal the real gaps in achievement between rich and poor, black and white, boys and girls, and other groups. Armed with these numbers, parents and policymakers could push to make education the vehicle for social mobility it’s meant to be, by highlighting the schools that support kids with high-quality learning and those that don’t.
It is hardly headline news that Americans have lost faith in government. But a new Pew Research Center survey shows just how little faith they have in most institutions that make up daily American life.
In 2015, Jennifer Nicolaisen was working in consulting and getting by some days on just two hours of sleep. She was a 27-year-old statistician in northern Virginia, basking in what she called “rising star energy”—the glow that came from approval from her boss, her clients, and her peers. It was a thrill, she says.
For nearly two decades, America’s elite universities have tried to convince the public that they are deeply committed to diversifying their student bodies, breaking up the concentration of rich, white kids who have traditionally filled their campuses to usher in something that more closely resembles the country’s racial and socioeconomic makeup. According to The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, a new book by veteran journalist Paul Tough, the effort has been either half-baked or just shockingly unsuccessful.
Jo Johnson, the UK prime minister’s brother, quit his job as a member of parliament and government minister today (Thursday), citing family strife as the cause. In a tweet, Johnson (Jo) said:
This summer, Blakeley Payne, a graduate student at MIT, ran a week-long course on ethics in artificial intelligence for 10-14 year olds. In one exercise, she asked the group what they thought YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was used for.
In this conference call, senior reporter Jenny Anderson and editor Jason Karaian took your questions about the wave of entrepreneurs focused on the market to support new parents. Among other things, they discussed:
Parenting can be a bear. Lovely as those kids may be, they are also often cranky, whiny, and demanding. (And they need to be fed. A LOT. Every day, in fact.)
You may want to learn more about how technology can help new parents (or not), how governments are spending on early childhood education and care, or the science behind how babies’ brains develop. There are plenty of resources, and below is a selection that helped inform our field guide on the business of early childhood development.
Ever since the world discovered that Finnish kids start school at seven, have very little homework, don’t take a lot of high-stakes tests, and yet still perform well on international assessments of reading, math, and science, the country has been a darling of the educational world.
Right after the turn of the century, Pat Kuhl, who studies speech and hearing at the University of Washington, ran a pair of experiments with English-speaking nine-month-old babies. Parents brought their infants to her lab 12 times for 25-minute sessions, with the group divided into two. One group spent the sessions with a native Mandarin Chinese speaker who sang, played, and spoke with the infants; the other did the same activities in English. After 12 sessions, the researchers measured how well the babies could distinguish Mandarin Chinese sounds. The babies had basically become native listeners: they could recognize as many sounds as infants raised in Taiwan.
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan welcomed their first child to the world by committing $45 billion in Facebook shares to tackling the ills of the world. One of their initiative’s projects is the Primary School, which integrates education, health, and community support services for disadvantaged families and children from birth.
In 2010, Gustavo Rodríguez was a mergers and acquisitions banker for Merrill Lynch, living in London, where he had moved from New York. Then, he became a father.
For nearly 30 years, Javier Aceves worked as a pediatrician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, focusing primarily on disadvantaged families. His approach was holistic: along with treating children, he did outreach with teens, and helped children’s parents with everything from addiction to learning how to be a supportive caregiver. For all the programs he helped develop, the patterns he kept seeing haunted him. He could treat young kids’ medical problems, but as they grew up, “we’d lose them to violence,” he says. Kids died all the time, by homicide or suicide.
It’s no secret that women do a lot more unpaid work than men, and that to get to any semblance of gender equality men need to do more.
Common Sense Media surveyed parents and teens about their media use in 2016, and published a bracing report subtitled “Concern, Controversy and Finding Balance.” The group surveyed a similar group in 2019 and the most concerning findings are about parents, not kids.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. Day last year, Celeste Law’s eight-year-old daughter told her mother that she didn’t know much about Martin Luther King Jr. Law recalled seeing an ad for Outschool, a marketplace for small, online classes aimed at middle- and high-school students. She checked it out. There was a 90-minute class on King. She investigated the site, saw it was safe and cheap, and let her daughter try it.
As an American, I’m generally happy living in the UK, which I have done for nearly five years. I don’t miss the guns, the endless politicking, or the aggressive 24/7 marketing. Holidays, however, almost always make me homesick. This harmonica rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” performed today in New Jersey, captures so much of what I miss about America in a mere two minutes.
Britain has been in turmoil ever since it voted narrowly to leave the EU three years ago. It is mired in an existential debate about its position in Europe, with broad disagreement about the best way to extract itself from the EU. Divisions within the ruling Conservative party led prime minister Theresa May to announce that she would leave her post on June 7.
The Irish overwhelmingly voted in favor of changing the country’s archaic divorce laws, which currently require a four-year waiting period. More than 82% of voters supported changing the constitution to lower the waiting time, and also to recognize foreign divorces. It was the largest margin of victory for a referendum since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which 95% of voters backed.
By now, many well-heeled American parents have signed up their kids for summer camps in coding, math, innovation, or some other subject for intensive, immersive study.
Donald Trump’s presidency is notable for breaking the rules: he refuses to release his tax returns, regularly insults his own intelligence agencies, and stymies attempts at congressional oversight of the White House.
