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Preschool Paradox II
This is a version of my Preschool Paradox which I’ve posted at WBUR’s new online magazine, Cognoscenti. It’s a bit more “suitable for work” than my earlier screedy blog iteration. I’ve just started as...
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On Losing a Friend
My Friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them. -Emily Dickinson I lost my oldest friend two weeks ago to Multiple Sclerosis, a friend I’ve known for 38 years, since I was twelve....
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A Dollar a Day Keeps the Baby Away
Here’s my TIME.com proposal on how to save money and reduce societal mayhem. (Hat tip to Adam Glick, and to the few programs, like College Bound Sisters, already doing just that.) I’ve written more on...
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Carrots and Sticks and the politics of teen pregnancy
To the folks who think I’m crazy for proposing that we pay kids not to get pregnant, a few questions. Why is it so abhorrent to incentivize people, financially, to behave in certain ways? I’m talking...
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A Free Lunch
I’m getting a lot of inquiries from people at CNN and radio shows asking me to talk about paying at-risk teenagers not to become pregnant. Mainly, people seem to think I’m totally nuts, so let me...
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Gone Maple Sugarin’ (Instagram version)
Apparently my life would be richer with Instagram. My kids keep telling me to get (an?) (on?) Instagram. I think it’s a graphical Twitter, which isn’t as illuminating to me as you’d think. This stuff...
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What’s Really Scandalous About the School Testing Scandal
Sorry I’ve been off the grid for a while! Here’s my TIME.com post this morning on the real scandal behind the Atlanta public schools cheating scandal. If you care about what’s going wrong in our...
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Can We Get Kids Off the College Admissions Hamster Wheel?
Here’s a piece I just posted at WBUR’s Cognoscenti. It’s a real proposal for an experiment that I think could “work” in the sense that no matter what the outcome, we would gain useful information with...
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How to Survive an Attack
There’s something grimly understated about this article from the NYT on how to survive a mass homicide attack. Apparently, we now have a large enough sample size from these shootings to talk...
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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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A Boston Patriot
(Update: I just learned that the sister of one of our dining hall workers here at Harvard College was among the victims. My heart goes out to her devastated family.) The Shot heard ’round the world....
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The Little State That Could (or: More Warm Fuzzies for Mass-holes)
I’m re-posting something I wrote last year, about my home state, that seems especially appropriate today. Enjoy. (I hope it goes without saying that I’m not trying to make light of recent events, but I...
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My Big Fat American Government
Hey, props to Boston! Taxachusetts, I heart you. Gimme some B-I-G government! O big/bloated/corrupt government-shunners, O bombastic, ignorant Tea partiers, O federal trough-slopping hypocrites… come...
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Who You Gonna Call In A Crisis?
I want to return to my “Big Fat American Government” piece I posted a couple days ago. I think the horrific explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas is a chilling counterpoint to the...
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Painful Questions
How do we talk about the Boston marathon murders in a way that acknowledges the suffering and the evil, yet also places them within the broader perspective of suffering and evil that the human race has...
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Two Degrees of Separation From a Bomber
A TIME.com column I wrote today with my husband, Nicholas Christakis: We spent a tense hour last Monday checking Facebook and Twitter to account for all 400 of our students at Harvard College, several...
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Empathy Gap
My family and Bangladesh go way back: I lived in Bangladesh for a year when I was in my early twenties. A decade later, in an odd twist of fate, my sister moved to Bangladesh, too, and stayed there...
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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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Angelina and Our Altered States
My TIME.com post today on… what else? Angelina Jolie’s disclosure of her recent preventive double mastectomy and breast reconstruction was rightly hailed as a sensible public health message to women...
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