Columns

Women are about to outnumber men in the nation’s law schools, a development heralding yet another milestone for women and a foreshadowing of great cultural change in the way law is practiced in this country. There can be no doubt about the former. The latter may not be so easy.Women have been

From the daily barrage of news, certain stories stick with me. When my daughters were small, the reports of children abducted from campgrounds or snatched on their way to school haunted me. As they grow older, accounts of teenage drivers wrapped around trees or spread on freeways resonate. But for s

Having scaled the steep rock mass to gain a panorama of the canyon, I stood facing an expanse of parched earth that seemed to be without end. My heart pounded, not because of the climb but because, from my precipitous perch on the edge of this overhanging slab, I could not afford the slightest misst

Here’s the latest dispatch from the global marketplace. Dozens of Vietnamese women working in a sweatshop in American Samoa were beaten, deprived of food and not paid minimum wages as they carried out their assigned role in our great borderless economy. The workers were making clothes for a Ko

I was a melancholy child. The photo albums show a toddler with a woebegone expression peeking at the world through the bars of a playpen. My earliest memory is trailing my mom around the house as she vacuumed and asking her over and over, Do you love me? Silencing the roaring machine momentarily, sh

‘Newt Gingrich, in a speech delivered during what President Bush dubbed “Education Week,” declared that if every four-year-old in America had her own computer and was on the Internet, we’d see an enormous difference in the quality of thinking and learning of our young people.

Last summer, after the Republican National Convention made history by nominating the son of a former president as its standard-bearer, the writer Andrew Sullivan raised an issue that only now is beginning to make its way onto op-ed pages. How was it, Sullivan wondered, that in a supposedly meritocra

The U.S. federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., is a harsh and punishing place, as correctional facilities are meant to be. Privileges for relatively normal communication that are allowed the general population do not apply to those on Death Row. A separate wing shelters the men condemned to dea

Knock, knock.

Nobody seems quite sure what the immigrant-returning immigrant ratio might be today, but I suspect it is higher than most people might think. Labor is following the lead of capitalit is fickle, it follows the market, and it is decidedly unsentimental. To cite just one example: thousands of Irish imm