Slate

As touchscreen tablets become the hot holiday gift for children—even for tots still learning to walk and talk—parents can be forgiven for feeling a little confused and skeptical about this new trend, especially when it comes to claims about education. The iTunes App Store boasts more than 700,000 apps and, as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center discovered earlier this year, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling paid apps in the education category are aimed at children. Many of these apps make claims about helping children learn to read.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is little known, but it wields a tremendous amount of power: It controls all of the Web’s top-level domains (those letters after the “dot,” like .com and .org). Currently, ICANN is in the midst of creating hundreds (and possibly thousands) of new, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that span a host of different ideas, from .web to .cars to .anything_else_you_can_imagine. These new gTLDs have the potential to dramatically affect the future of Internet browsing, and they’re already stirring up some serious discussion.

In his Essays, the great observer of human nature Michel de Montaigne described how Lycurgus, the lawgiver of ancient Sparta, decreed that married couples should engage in sexual pleasure only by stealth. The challenge of arranging their trysts while endeavoring to avoid discovery by others would, Lycurgus reasoned, introduce a level of excitement to marriages that might otherwise grow stale.

I asked Annie Murphy Paul, the author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, about how much of an impact cursing has on babies in the womb. She backed up my pregnancy newsletter: Newborns can recognize their ...

Au cours de mes recherches, j'ai compris que des chiffres identiques pouvaient raconter des histoires radicalement différentes. Dans mon livre, et dans celui de Liza Mundy, The Richer Sex [Le sexe le plus riche], il y a par exemple des statistiques qui ...

For more information, see Investing in Girls, a paper that looks at how linking technology and savings-focused cash transfers can help close the global gender gap.

Is there a lesson in the nude bananas incident?

Last month, a German-owned “common sense” supermarket chain, Billa, posted a picture of some bananas on its Facebook page. Harmless, right? Except for some reason, the bananas were peeled then packaged in Styrofoam trays wrapped with cellophane. It wasn’t the best PR move for a supposedly “environmentally conscious” company.

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place.” This was a soothing phrase to those who felt that his predecessor had ignored the scientific consensus on climate change and environmental issues, on stem cells, and on the teaching of evolution in schools, among other subjects. But it is the second, forgotten half of Obama’s sentence that best embodies a misapprehension of science shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. Obama promised to “wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.”