I can't think of a gentle way to say this so I'll just be frank. No one - well, there might be an exception that proves the rule, but essentially no one - is going to accept a college applicant who writes like a dream about a topic no...

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college I got a postcard from a boy in my sociology class. It read something like this: "Please, read Goodbye, Columbus right now."

So I did.

In the summer between my daughter's freshman and sophomore year in college, she stood...

A new PEW Research Center study is full of firsts: More students in college than ever before, more students completing high school, fewer high-school dropouts, more boys staying in school, more Hispanic high-school graduates and fewer dropouts, even if their college enrollment rate is flat. The black student...

Hi. Now that I know you want to spend more time with me, would you tell me exactly how much you make, how much you owe, how much you're worth, how big the re-fi is, and oh, do you own any cows?

Welcome to the world of financial...

Early decision: A senior applies to a pie-in-the-sky school in November and gets an answer before Christmas, while everyone else is still filing applications. "Yes" means that the second half senior year will be more fun than the pervasive nervous breakdown. "No," or a deferral, means joining the rest of...

The easy unplug is this: No devices while eating, period, ever, end of sentence,
non-negotiable.

The more challenging and glorious unplug is seventeen hands high, about 1200 pounds, possessed of four gears and reverse. I am a confirmed city slicker, but when I have a...

It's fall. Normal happy people watch the leaves change color, but parents of seniors care only for the stark black and white landscape of inked circles on bubble grids. Adults whose SAT prep involved two sharpened number two pencils and a good breakfast invest in test prep because we're...

I've been right where you're standing, waiting outside the college counselor's office for that first appointment of your child's senior year, trying and failing to balance absolute pride and abject panic. Let me clarify one thing before you get started: From here on in, nothing is as it seems.

It's that time of year again. All over the country, people are loading up the family car, paying airline overage for heavy suitcases, or shipping boxes of stuff to a college dorm room that is not big enough to hold half of it.

They're making sure their...

It's not for nothing that companies sign up high-profile celebrities to sell their goods: the customer's drawn as much to borrowed élan as to a product. Surely, Gwyneth Paltrow's scent of choice and the timepiece that adorns Roger Federer's wrist must smell and tell time better, respectively, than any...

So I was on a coast-to-coast flight {deep vein thrombosis?}, feeling a crick in my neck {fibromyalgia?} and a bit of the blues that sometimes set in around Colorado heading west {depression?} thinking about loosening the seat belt {irritable bowel?}, watching a CNN roundtable discussion of the health-care crisis. Polarities...

When my almost 20-year-old daughter was little, someone suggested that I not teach her how to cook, for the same reason that some people thought girls should not learn to type. If you have the skill you'll end up having to use it, was how the thinking went, so...

In the name of transparency, yes, my late father lit one cigarette off the end of another from the time he was twelve until nine months before he died of lung cancer at sixty-five, so, no, I am not objective when it comes to tobacco.
On the...

It's not easy getting on the plane alone when you're in your mid-eighties, you're barely five feet tall, and you carry a doctor's letter explaining that it's either the titanium hip or the rods in your back or big toe that set off the security alarm, and not anything that...

Those underfed, longer-lived skinny monkeys are the hit medical story of the moment because they eat less and live longer, and what works for them might work for us, which is all we really care about.

Calorie-restriction diets have been around for a long time. Periodically,...

I was walking down a street in Venice, California a couple of days ago where no one seemed to have heard of the recession: People were strolling, window-shopping, occasionally buying, and they were eating ice cream, dropping into a beautiful little garden restaurant for tea, having an espresso at...

Here is the hard truth about health-care reform: No matter how good it is, it won't come soon enough and won't be profound enough to spare all of us from insurance companies that seem to cover only what we don't need done, from hospitals that rival the military in...

Imagine for a difficult moment that your young son, who is autistic, does not talk. His silence is so absolute that you begin to think he cannot talk, that this is a matter of inability, not choice.

Then a nice young woman asks you to hide behind a...

If we have learned anything this year, it is the first rule of Ponziconomics: If an investment sounds too good to be true, it undoubtedly is.

Except for this one, which requires much less upfront cash and promises much more at the back end, as long as you...

Anyone who's awake can rattle off the bad guys, by name, by category, by the extreme price they've had to pay - the auctioning off of an extra house, a yacht, or, perish the thought, a treasured art collection - for what they've done. But here's a bracing concept,...