In a few months’ time, my wife and I will send our second child to daycare. Like all parents, nothing is more precious to us than our children. So it’s surprising that the people whom parents trust to take care of their kids—childcare workers and preschool teachers—get paid median salaries of just $22,290 and $28,990
READ MOREVenezuela has recently experienced a wave of blackouts resulting from the ineptitude of Maduro’s dictatorship, whose policies have led the country to the most severe economic crisis of its history. The lack of access to electricity is having an unprecedented humanitarian impact on the Venezuelan population. Food is spoiling in unpowered refrigerators, looters are running
READ MOREHere’s a headline worth pondering: “Chinese parents want students to wear dystopian brainwave-detecting headbands.” The story, on the website SupChina, details the latest innovation at the Jiangnan Experimental School in Hangzhou. Interestingly enough, the electronic headband, dubbed Focus EDU, is made by a Harvard-incubated American startup, BrainCo, based in Somerville, Massachusetts—right next to Cambridge. As the company’s chatty video explains, in a traditional
READ MOREYou are sick so you go to the hospital. There is no medicine. Diagnostic machines don’t work because the power is out. The lights aren’t on either. After nightfall, the whole place is pitch black. You can’t wander the halls. Too dangerous. Small wounds lead to amputation without anesthesia because there is no other way
READ MORESix months ago, it would have seemed impossible for the press to be more addicted to someone than they are to Donald Trump. Yet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is clearly giving the president a run for his money. In breathless coverage that any attention-hungry celebrity would sell his own mother to achieve, the media dutifully informs
READ MOREA full-blown war is raging against the Electoral College. But as activist groups become more desperate to overturn our way of electing presidents before voters go the polls in November 2020, their arguments become more absurd and hyperbolic. CNN recently ran a preposterous segment suggesting that James Madison called the Electoral College “evil,” a shameful
READ MORE“What are your long-term goals in life?” is a typical question posed by employers to job applicants. It’s a question many people hate answering. But a young college-age friend of mine has the best answer I’ve ever heard. Without batting an eye, she regularly responds: “Be a trophy wife.” She has so much talent and
READ MOREFreedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. – Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” 1776. Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in chains this morning. The U.K. government plans to extradite
READ MOREClassic short stories are one of my great loves. There’s no better avenue to a quick emotional payoff or a poignant lesson than a tale that is so powerful it has survived through history. A poster child for such stories is “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, which first made its appearance on
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