Emily Popek

When shapes take on meaning as letters and those letters start to form words, it can be magical for children. It’s the first step into the wonderful world of reading. Yet, for many young students across the United States, the magic just isn’t happening.

Fifteen years after “Supernanny” came to the United States, the show is back on Lifetime TV, giving us the chance to peer into the homes of other parents once more. And what we see is the crest of a wave of intensive parenting that had only just started to form when the show debuted.

Now is the time for schools to stop viewing accommodations and accessibility as an afterthought and begin to take advantage of a digital learning possibility: equity in education.

What's the difference between a child who's bright, and one who's truly gifted? Experts weigh in on how to think about our children's abilities and find the best way for them to be challenged at school.

The year was 1993. Thousands of poor farmers from across the world came together to offer a better way to feed the world. They called themselves La Via Campesina— the peasants’ way—and their idea was known as “food sovereignty.”
Food sovereignty means giving communities power over the food they eat and grow. It means rebuilding food systems around local climates and indigenous histories.

As parents, we want our children to be emotionally resilient — able to handle life’s ups and downs. But parents’ ability to foster resilience in our children hinges a great deal on our own emotional resilience.

“Boys have feelings.”
That’s the simple message behind Wonder Crew dolls, which Laurel Wider, a psychotherapist based in Northampton, Mass., developed in 2015 after her son came home from preschool and announced that his teacher had told him: “Boys aren’t supposed to cry.”

It’s a moment no parent wants to experience: In my daughter’s folder was a sealed letter from the principal. The words “tragedy” and “loss of life” jumped out at me, and I felt a knot build in my throat as my daughter watched me read.

“A generation of activists.”
That’s how Richard West, lead instructor of the Pre-College Politics, Activism and Leadership Institute at Emerson College in Boston, describes the teenagers of today. And high school students are lining up to take their activism to the next level at summer programs like Emerson’s.

The small community of Hobart, N.Y., is a village divided. The Mallinckrodt plant, where generic oxycodone tablets are produced in massive quantities, employs hundreds of people. But the region is also facing the same opioid crisis that grips much of the nation — and which some regulators argue that very plant has helped to fuel.

Ramps—also known as wild leeks or ramson—are a staple of spring foraging and local food festivals across the Northeast. Now, a movement is afoot to keep us from loving them into extinction.

If social media is any indication, many Americans would rather watch The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s turn-of-this-century fantasy of a Democratic presidency, than tune in to the Trump Reality Show. But some of us haven’t been too pleased with what we’ve found.

I talked to author Jamie Beth Cohen about her debut young adult novel, "Wasted Pretty," for The Rumpus.

Andrews' book distinguishes itself from conventional labor histories by going beyond sociological factors to look at the total physical environment and the role it played in the lives of both labor and management, and how it would lead to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914....

Singing the 'Sacred Harp' songbook gets a revival in the Catskills