One reason I value my newspaper subscription is that it reminds me not to take things for granted. Especially when it comes to technology. In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler recounted a conversation with alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra. …

This blog post summarizes a paper about children and privacy online that will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing on November 7th. Glance into a typical family living room or school classroom and you’ll probably see tablets or netbooks among the toys, books…

The first complete piece of writing I authored was a four-stanza poem about the seasons. I was seven. In middle school, I started a family newsletter, the Kumar News (it lasted two issues) and wrote 150 pages of a novel about a fantasy land called Mystica (then writer’s block struck)…

My receipt printed with an X. My husband’s did not. We had just returned to the U.S. after a relaxing beach vacation abroad, our delayed honeymoon, and we were waiting at Customs. We went through the passport express kiosk, where individuals scan their passports and answer a few questions. My…

What We Can Learn From The Life of Oliver Sacks — In 1966, Oliver Sacks hit rock bottom. He held a medical degree from the University of Oxford and had completed his residency at UCLA. He had published research papers in scientific journals and was working in a laboratory at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. But…

When I was 13 or 14, my parents gave me “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” by Sean Covey for Christmas. I devoured the book, re-reading it for the next several years. It was the first book in which I highlighted, dog-eared, and wrote notes directly on the pages. …

Only hindsight can reveal that the job ad you answered on a whim would turn out to shape so much of your future. — Image by Sean Winters/Flickr, CC-BY-SA The American Journalism Review recently announced that it would cease publication after 38 years. AJR stopped producing print issues two years ago and became online only. I worked as an editorial assistant at AJR during my final semester of college, and a year later I…

Parents, Children, and Social Media — Image courtesy Reuters One evening while perusing Facebook, Christine encountered a profile with a public cover image that depicted her two-year-old son sitting in a pile of leaves. The profile belonged to Christine’s babysitter, and Christine hadn’t seen the picture before. (The names of parents in this article are pseudonyms.) …