The promise of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 2001 legislation was, as the name says, that no child would be left behind. A key piece of this legislation is the annual testing of every child from third through eighth grade and then once in high...

We’ve been conditioned by television and movies to accept the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. “Of course there’s intelligent life out there; I saw it last week on Star Trek.” We’ve seen it all, from the cute and cuddly ET to the fanged...

In the neighborhood where I lived as a graduate student in the mid-1970s, there was a man whose face was remarkably disfigured. Half of it seemed melted, as if it had been fashioned of candle wax. You would spot him after dark on the streets near my university,...