When it comes to preparing young children for successful lives, few factors weigh more heavily than early reading.

A Harvard Graduate School of Education study found that reading to children starting very early — even as babies — gives them measurable advantages later over those who don’t have that exposure. The American Academy of ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — If Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature truly believe that slow vote counting is a horrible problem — which it’s not — right now is the time to fix it.

They’re crafting a new state budget. And they could choose to spend the money needed to help counties hire more temporary election workers, buy more ...Read more

My favorite tech trend so far this year has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

It’s the cool girls making their own “cyberdecks,” — strange, DIY and highly customizable personal computers that explicitly reject AI. They look like props from a cyberpunk movie, usually built on a Raspberry Pi base and spare parts. As one tinkerer...Read more

The New York Times last week told the story of Sidharth Hariharan, a mathematics graduate student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University who spent more than two years helping translate one of the past decade’s most celebrated proofs into a form a computer could check, a painstaking task called formalization.

Earlier this year an ...Read more

TONOPAH, Nev. — Some years ago, Harry Chahal and his wife were on a trip to Las Vegas when, like countless motorists before and since, they passed through this high desert speck of a town.

Tonopah, built by the mining industry around 1900 and depleted as the gold, silver, lead and mercury petered out, is a remote way station about halfway ...Read more

Illinois’ new budget includes a new tax — shocking, we know. This time, the target is social media companies.

The plan is to create a graduated tax of sorts on those powerful businesses, based on the number of users they have here in Illinois.

The architects behind this grand idea say that it will generate about $200 million per year.

If ...Read more

President Donald Trump is proud of America, and he wants you to be proud too. He chides the head of the Smithsonian Institution for his 250th anniversary exhibits because they don’t say we’re special enough, and he issues a directive to “Celebrate American Exceptionalism.”

Fifty years ago, when my father, Daniel Boorstin, was librarian ...Read more

As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding later this summer, there will be extensive celebration and reflection about our democracy and the values it embodies. But the 250th is not the only anniversary that should capture our attention. Indeed, our nation’s story is an evolution of moments built over time.

...Read more

We have two new problems in the asylum system, a dangerous combination that started last month: The asylum application now costs $102 to file, but asylum seekers are no longer allowed to apply for the right to work until a full year passes after submitting their application. My clients are officially stuck.

One of them is nine months pregnant. ...Read more

Some of the nation’s largest corporations are joining forces with the White House to turn the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this July 4 into a celebration of militarism and the mixing of church and state.

The group behind this effort is America250. Its nearly 60 corporate sponsors include Amazon, American...Read more

Students who struggle speaking English are having a hard time learning other subjects.

The Clark County, Nevada, School District recently released an efficiency study. It contained a number of recommendations to save money and improve student achievement. Among the recommendations was centralizing software management to avoid duplication and ...Read more

In one of the weirder political twists of the moment, the two Democrats who stand the greatest chance of flipping the Senate in November represent opposite ideals of American manhood.

One, an archetypal warrior, is being accused of toxic masculinity; the other, a proselytizer for compassion and empathy, has been derided as not manly enough.

In...Read more

LOS ANGELES — There's the Scottish soccer fan who marveled at our wildly varied landscape and welcoming communities as he walked from L.A. to Boston, arriving in time to see Scotland play Haiti on Saturday. There's the German traveling in the opposite direction from Atlanta who could not get over the wonders of the hospitable South, from Stone...Read more

We come to this moment from different directions. But today we stand in the same park, seeing the same thing: Something extraordinary is happening on Chicago’s South Side.

For almost 100 years, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry has been a place where generations have come together to learn, imagine and see themselves as part of ...Read more

The Obama Presidential Center’s unrelenting marketing campaign and weekslong soft opening have inspired an avalanche of opinions and emotions. For me, one feature rises above all: the new Obama Presidential Center branch of the Chicago Public Library. The 5,000-square-foot space in the center’s plaza is free and accessible to all.

Unlike ...Read more

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Washington and Europe expected a quick Russian victory. Russia’s population was more than three times that of Ukraine, its military four times larger and gross domestic product 10 times bigger. The power imbalance was just too great. That Russia was entirely in the wrong...Read more

As soon as enough votes were counted to officially knock Tom Steyer out of the California governor's race, the anti-billionaire schadenfreude kicked in.

Social media and legacy media, conservative and liberal, all seemed to have a rare melding of the minds, delivering endless variations of, "How dare he try to buy elected office! We showed him....Read more

A deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is set for signature on Friday, and Donald Trump is already congratulating himself on being the first U.S. president to have made peace with Iran since the country’s 1979 revolution. That’s wrong. He is the first to have taken America to war with Iran, and therefore the first to have needed a truce to ...Read more

There are two processes that we cannot escape: aging and math. This applies not only to human beings but also to large government social-insurance programs.

Last week the Social Security Administration released its annual trustees report, and the news was not good. Starting in the fourth quarter of 2032, one quarter earlier than previously ...Read more

Steven Spielberg’s spectacular career arc includes popular popcorn films like “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” as well as more sober, serious cinema like “Lincoln” and “Saving Private Ryan.” But while the movies vary, there’s one theme he keeps returning to: the possibility (or probability, as Spielberg seems to see it) of ...Read more