Monica Potts

Is that some for-profit colleges mislead students and some even encourage financial-aid fraud. According to The New York Times, the report not only found that four schools allegedly encouraged undercover investigators to commit outright fraud by lying about their savings but all of them lured students in with overblown expectations for future career glory: In […]

David Leonhardt devotes his column today to the motherhood problem in the workplace. He cites research showing that many of the differences in earnings and promotion between women and men stems from women taking time off — or moving to a part-time schedule — for family reasons. On the other hand, women without children earn […]

From ColorLines comes this excellent video and accompanying story of what it feels like to be stopped and frisked by police in Brownsville, Brooklyn. That neighborhood, along with the nearby neighborhoods of Crown Heights and East New York, are some of the “Impact Zones” flooded with police officers to address the sorts of low-level, quality-of-life […]

Yesterday, Radley Balko linked to a City Journal piece on the government’s nutrition guidelines explaining how researchers sometimes get things wrong and recommend eating practices that ultimately prove harmful. One assumes this should be taken as a lesson to ignore public-health advice going forward. The larger point, however, is that we tend to overreact or […]

Today, a federal judge ruled against the federal government, which requested the court throw out a lawsuit by the state of Virginia challenging the health-care reform act. The government argued that the lawsuit didn’t have merit both because Virginia didn’t have standing — the individual mandate hasn’t gone into effect yet and, in any case, […]

Sometime in the next 24 hours, BP officials hope, the busted oil well in the Gulf of Mexico can be permanently sealed. That would mean an end to the disaster caused by a rig explosion that has left as much as 5 million barrels of oil gushing into the gulf for more than 100 days. […]

Lisa Belkin writes today about a new study finding not only that the sexual orientation of parents doesn’t affect children’s well-being but actually goes beyond that to recommend against policies that exclude gay and lesbian couples from adopting children. Florida, Mississippi, and Utah currently ban adoption by same-sex couples explicitly. An Arkansas law prohibiting unmarried, […]

This week, New York City agreed to settle a civil suit in the shooting of Sean Bell — an unarmed 23-year-old man killed outside a strip club by police in 2006 — for $7 million. According to The New York Times story, the negotiations lasted days, and most of the money will go to Bell’s […]