Tag: middle school
Life Really Is Better Without the Internet
Before our first child was born last year, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with
Trans in Texas – The Atlantic
This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments
The Ripple Effects of Japanese American Reparations
In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their
The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption
Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday?
The ‘Mother of the Year’ Who Starved for 53 Months
Years ago, when I was in the seventh grade, an octopus sailed off the seafloor and secured herself to a rocky outcropping off the coast of California. She was nearly a mile below the surface, thousands of feet past any tendrils of sun. But in the bright beams of a submarine, the octopus’s edges glowed the reddish purple of a salted Japanese plum.
I know about the purple octopus because a remotely operated submersible watched her glide toward the cliff.
21 Reader Views on the Masculinity Crisis
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “Why are men and boys struggling? What should we do about it?” No other question has elicited so many responses, and they were especially varied, so this is a long edition.
Tim argues that we are
‘What People Don’t Get About My Job,’ According to Workers
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.
Several weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their jobs. I thought we might receive several dozen replies. Instead, we received several hundred. We heard from teachers and professors; from opera singers and orchestra musicians; from corporate executives and tech workers; from screenwriters, playwrights,
My Great-Uncle, The Holocaust’s First Jewish Victim
Here is the foundational narrative on which I was raised: In March 1933, my great-uncle Arthur Kahn walked out of his apartment in Würzburg, Germany, for what was supposed to be a short Easter-break trip to see relatives. He was 21, training to be a doctor. He didn’t know it, but his name had been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist ties. He had none, but he was arrested in Nuremberg. A few weeks later, he was
How the Pandemic Has Shaped Babies’ Development
Two years is a long time in any child’s life. It’s half of high school and most of middle school, time enough for a grade schooler to notch several inches on the kitchen doorframe and for toddlers to leap from first words to conversations. For the babies born in March 2020, just as the pandemic was declared, two years make up their whole lives.
From the minute these children were born in empty maternity wards to now—as their parents are
There’s No Such Thing as ‘the Latino Vote’
Latinos and their ancestors have lived in the Americas for 500 years, yet it feels like many Americans are perpetually in the act of discovering us—especially when elections are looming. We are instrumental to the emerging Democratic majority that Blue America longs for, that Red America fears, and that never quite seems to arrive.
The 2020 census showed