Book Review

At the start of the pandemic, Anya Kamenetz realized her apartment had a built-in alarm system. It went off at...

Essential Labor is both a memoir and a call to action. The caregiving crisis the US finds itself in now will outlast the pandemic and we must figure out ways to care for each other.

Children 2, 3 and 4 years old—especially boys and Black children—are being kicked out of their schools at “staggering rates,” she writes—more than three times that of K–12 school children.

Children and the people who love them endured a lot in 2020 and 2021. This was one of the most trying times in human history, and NPR education correspondent Kamenetz eloquently and humanely depicts the panic that reigned in every household, office, court and classroom.

Rachael Katz (MS Ed.) and Helen Shwe Hadani (Ph.D.) are excellent companions for mothers, fathers and caregivers of young children. Their views on parenting derive from their own families, as well as extensive reading into the science of brain development.

Economists are famously bad at predicting the future. (There’s even an old joke: Why did God create economists? To make weather forecasters look good.) Nevertheless, thinking like an economist can help prepare us for what lies ahead for our children.

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Paul effectively makes the case that most of the metaphors we have for cognition are not useful because they allude to Western society’s assumption that thinking only happens inside the brain: the ubiquitous admonition to “use your head.”

In her excellent book, Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, Dr. Susan Linn brings this insidious behemoth to the foreground and underscores it with bright red lines.