I love driving. But it's also a great source of ill will in society. I don't just mean driving is a stage where bad character is performed. It is an experience that inevitably creates bad emotions. If driving makes you angry, bitter or fearful, don't blame yourself (or those driving...

At the big-box home center today I strolled out of the garden section pushing a cart with $10 worth of supplies, right past three employees who wished me a good day without any verification that I had paid for my goods (I had, at a register inside, out of their...

Devon Avenue was nearly silent at dawn on the morning after her funeral, a memorial to the growing silence of her generation. Sylvia Cohen - born Tzivya (צִבְיָה) Patinkin in 1913, in the Polish town of Brańsk - who walked into the hospital under her own power a few months...

Here is the text I gave to graduates in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Management and Society program. After some opening pleasantries . . .

For this year's commencement I think we need to talk a little about myth and reality, and about a...

The news is out that Emily has been displaced as the #1 American girl's name. The new top name is Emma, according to the Social Security Administration's database of names for newborn children. Parents interested in the happening names consult this list, along with many others available in...

Is the American house made of glass?

Maybe the United States should require all the countries we occupy to implement an equal rights law for women, something like the one we never passed: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States...

In the Iowa court case that legalized same-sex marriage in that state, some "experts" offered testimony that same-sex marriage is bad for children. A group of social science organizations and scholars, myself included, signed an amicus brief arguing that evidence should be excluded because it lacked scientific merit. In...

Over the 10 years up to 2007, the U.S. deported 108,434 adults whose children were U.S. citizens, according to a Department of Homeland Security report. The exact number of citizen children left behind in these deportations is unknown, because no one in the government cared to count them. The...

UPDATE: Under the erroneous headline, "Welfare Aid Isn't Growing As Economy Drops Off," the New York Times now reports on these numbers. They focus on the annual trend, which is still flat, rather than the third-quarter spike. The point is well taken, though -- the main accomplishment of the...

By ending the welfare entitlement in 1996, the Democratic party shed the burden of representing the stigmatized poor. It's hard to remember how much this issue influenced politics in the 1980s and 1990s -- but it did. In fact, that accomplishment must be pretty high up the list of...

New data show an unmistakable trend: American women are having more kids. The total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children a woman will bear over her lifetime if current rates persist. Roughly speaking, averaging about 2.1 children or more is necessary for a population to grow...

Others and I have noted that building bridges and schools will mostly provide jobs for men. Men are losing more jobs than women so far in this recession, but there are new appeals for attention to gender in the economic crisis that warrant attention. Let's talk about...

I previously questioned a stimulus package that disproportionately creates jobs filled by men - a point now made more persuasively by Linda Hirshman. But I have since realized that men are losing many more jobs than women in the current recession. A housing bust, which crippled construction,...

UPDATE: Linda Hirshman has expanded on this topic in the December 9 New York Times.

President-elect Barack Obama's economic agenda includes a goal of creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011. It's too early to know the details of the plan, much less what will be enacted by Congress...

The DNA revolution has extended proof of the "traditional" family back to about 4,600 years ago, hundreds of years before Abraham's non-traditional family. New research from a burial site in central Europe confirms that a man, woman, and two young children buried together were a nuclear family...

When the Obamas move to Washington, they will establish a dream household in America's most storied house. They will also follow a tried and true pattern in today's modern, egalitarian-minded capitalist societies. More often than not, men get jobs and the family moves, with wives and children following the...

The white-knuckle moments on election night were fewer than many people expected. One source of fear had been the suspicion that the polls were wrong. Even after the networks started projecting winners, people with memories that reach back to 2000 were still sweating (after all, ABC projected Pennsylvania with no...

DeWayne McKinney, who served 19 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, made a name for himself as the man who wasn't bitter, who wouldn't devote his reclaimed life's energies to resentment and recrimination. He famously invited the judge who sentenced him...

Why is nursing home care so often so bad?

The latest bad news shows that "more than 90% of nursing homes were cited violations of federal health and safety standards last year." This follows an investigation by the New York Times last year, which found that investor-owned nursing...

Advocates for children with disabilities are mostly unimpressed by Sarah Palin's profession of support for children with disabilities, based on her history and policy positions. But the attention generated by her use of the issue should be good for something.

In fact, disabilities play a large, and...