Children and Family

Caring in Viral Times

Amid widespread indifference toward the most vulnerable, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.

  • Michael McColly

America’s Long War on Children and Families

A new book shows how Trump’s family separation policy belongs to a much longer history of child-taking by the U.S. government.

  • Paul M. Renfro

Incarcerated Fathers. Trans Fathers. Founding Fathers.

An alternative father’s day reading list.

The End of Family Values

Neoliberalism rests on the myth that “good” families can provide for their own without public support.

  • Julie Kohler

High Stakes Tests Aren’t Better—And They Never Will Be

Accountability is important. But tests that tie school funding to student performance only make things worse.

  • Lelac Almagor

Halloween and Stranger Danger

Bizarre restrictions are levied against people on the sex offense registry on Halloween. But do they actually make children safer or simply reveal what we fear?

  • Christine Hume

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Secularism’s Saints

How the Mormon Church redefined itself as a modern liberal religion.

  • Peter Coviello

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

Men can still opt out of these policies. The state needs to take more coercive action. 

  • Gina Schouten

What White Kids Learn About Race in School

Sixty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, U.S. schools remain largely segregated.

  • Erik Loomis

The Precarity of Black Motherhood

Jordan Peele's ‘Us’ depicts the terrors faced by black mothers in a way that owes as much to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ as it does to classic Hollywood horror. 

  • Tao Leigh Goffe

Who’s Your Daddy?

Despite promising a golden age of certainty, DNA-based paternity science has failed to settle the meaning of fatherhood.

  • Nara Milanich

Abortion’s Past and Future

Roe v. Wade is increasingly under threat.

Teaching Citizenship

Education’s most important job is to teach students to take an active role in their democracy, starting in their own communities.

  • Albert W. Dzur

Those Left Behind When #LoveWon

Did the success of gay marriage erode the radical potential of queer politics?

  • Hugh Ryan

All the Witches They Could Not Burn

A woman’s body is both a site of exploitation and a site of resistance. It is out of this vexed space that the witch is conjured.

  • Jessie Kindig

In the Name of Public Safety

The Mass Bail Out at Rikers Island shows that freedom is a critical part of public safety.

  • Jocelyn Simonson

Who’s Got Personality?

The Myers-Briggs Bias: An Interview with Merve Emre

  • Merve Emre
  • Deborah Chasman

Programming My Child

Through the experience of parenting his daughter, a software developer came to see Google and Facebook as the first digital children. 

  • David Auerbach

The Conversion of Pope Francis

The pontiff still hasn't commented on Ireland's abortion referendum. That could all change when he visits the country in August. 

  • Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Going to Work in Mommy’s Basement

From laundry to meal prep, apps tend to mimic maternal care. Is this good for women?

  • Sarah Sharma

When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children

Seventies activists wanted to emancipate kids and destroy the nuclear family—so how did we end up with gay marriage instead?

  • Michael Bronski

Guns in the Family

A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture.

  • Walter Johnson

Talking about Death

End-of-Life Care and Assisted Suicide

  • F. M. Kamm

How Good Health Became a Numbers Game

It is no longer necessary to feel ill in order to be ill.

  • Christopher J. Phillips
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