Happily Author Sabrina Orah Mark on the Enduring Power of Fairy Tales

Contributed by Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir. In this memoir-in-essays, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so

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Revealing a Black Feminist History Long Erased — A Message from Author Jenn M. Jackson, PhD

Contributed by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, author of Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism and an award-winning professor of political science at Syracuse University. I’ll never forget the way it felt when I first learned that there was no Black Feminist History course offered at my undergraduate university. This elite institution

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The Author of The Blue Sweater on Our Interconnected World and Combatting Poverty Worldwide

Contributed by Jacqueline Novogratz, author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. Chronicling her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it through the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, this book is a

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The Open Window: Representation Is for You, Too — A Message from Author Sara Nović

Contributed by Sara Nović, author of True Biz: A Novel. Following students at the River Valley School for the Deaf, True Biz is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable,

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Adam Benforado on Youth Rights and the Path to a Better Future

Contributed by Adam Benforado, author of A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All. Drawing on the latest research on the value of early intervention, investment, and empowerment, A Minor Revolution makes the urgent case for putting children first—in our budgets and policies, in how we develop products and enact laws, and in our families and communities.

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Psychologist Devon Price on Autism and the New Faces of Neurodiversity

Contributed by Devon Price, PhD, author of Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity I didn’t find out I was Autistic until after I completed my PhD in psychology in my mid-20s. Aside from a few brief mentions of the disability in a graduate-level developmental psychology class, I hadn’t learned Autism in my psychology

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Elizabeth Kolbert on Our Changing Climate and the Future Today’s Students Will Inherit

Contributed by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future “I’m a realist,” Ruth Gates was saying. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” Gates, then the head of Hawaii’s Institute of Marine Biology, had taken me out to

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Memoir as Medicine: Mallory Smith’s Salt in My Soul

Contributed by Diane Shader Smith, mother of Mallory Smith, author of Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life Literature and medicine have long been intertwined. In the early 2000s, Dr. Rita Charon helped formalize this intersection as a discipline through her work at Columbia University and her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness

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Columbia University Psychologist Lisa Miller on Cultivating Students’ Academic and Inner Lives

Contributed by Lisa Miller, PhD, author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life As an undergraduate psychology major at Yale, I always sat in the front row so that I might study not only the material but my professor as well. Like many students who sign

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Women Climate Leaders Provide Truth, Courage, and Solutions in All We Can Save

Contributed by Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis “I was shaking as I read the opening essay because I felt so empowered,” one of my students shared at the start of the fall 2020 semester. I’d spent the previous nine months co-editing the bestselling

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Neuroscientist Lisa Genova on the Intricacies of Memory

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and the acclaimed author of novels such as Still Alice. She travels worldwide speaking about neurological diseases and has appeared on Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and NPR. Her new book, Remember, is a deep dive into the science of human memory and the intricacies of the brain that help us

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Neal Gabler on Teaching the Next Generation About Their Political Heritage

Contributed by Neal Gabler, author of Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 What happened to America?  What happened to bring us to this moment of deep and perhaps unbridgeable polarization, of disorder and chaos, of skepticism about science, institutions, even the very idea of fact itself, of rising white supremacy, of

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