A week before I gave birth last February, the research team I work with published a study in a prominent scientific journal on how paid family leave affects maternal and child health. The study found that having access to paid family leave led to a decrease in postpartum depression and an increase in the number of weeks babies are breastfed.

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The scenes have been all over the news.

In Colorado, ICE smashes the window of a car with a 1-month-old inside, his mother crying out, “There’s a baby in here!”

A family of four in Chicago is surrounded at Millennium Park by heavily armed and masked immigration agents, while the 8-year-old daughter clutches her doll and sobs. The mother ...Read more

The governor of Utah has a problem. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, and a dry lakebed threatens to send arsenic-laced dust plumes across the state’s most populated areas.

Gov. Spencer Cox has risen to national prominence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s horrific slaying at Utah Valley University last month by calling on Americans to tone ...Read more

As President Donald Trump could have told you long ago, no international figure knows how to charm a visiting American like that other fellow who has been sharing the world stage with him for years.

But none of that was obvious on a night way back in 2010, in St. Petersburg, Russia. An audience studded with imported Hollywood stars had settled...Read more

The NCAA picked a hell of a week to get into the gambling business, didn't it?

Within 24 hours of approving a rule change that will allow student athletes and athletic department staff to bet only on professional sports, the FBI arrested more than 30 people in connection with a major sports gambling and betting scheme. The level of ...Read more

A few weeks ago, when new proposals limiting J and F visa expansion were open for public comment, immigration quickly became a hot topic again at our research center, where more than half the scientists come from abroad. Some worried about their plan, others traded news and updates about the H1-B. A colleague asked if I was anxious too. To my ...Read more

In defending his highly controversial proposal to impose a $21-per-month tax on the number of people big companies employ in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson likes to emphasize that the 100-employee threshold he is supporting confines the tax to a small fraction of the private-sector employers operating in the city.

Johnson told reporters last ...Read more

Criminals go to great lengths to obtain things of value. That’s worth remembering with universal mail ballots.

This month, thieves stole crown jewels from the Louvre. The brazen daytime heist took place while the museum was open. The thieves drove a truck with an electric ladder up to the museum and entered through a window. They then smashed...Read more

Don’t toss out your protein powder just yet.

A recent report about lead levels in protein supplements sparked unnecessary alarm about a product that an increasing number of Americans are using to meet their fitness and nutrition goals.

The alarm is largely overblown. But the strong public reaction to what was once a niche product should ...Read more

This month, President Donald Trump released new federal guidance encouraging private employers to include fertility treatments in their insurance coverage and announcing an agreement to reduce the cost of some IVF-associated drugs.

For those dealing with the disheartening struggles of infertility, this is good news. Republican Senator Katie ...Read more

Chicago, the city of broad shoulders and big ambitions, is facing a series of self-made calamities. Among them is a fiscal crunch that may soon become a crisis.

In recent years, Chicago has lagged the U.S. in job creation, wage growth and other key metrics while surpassing its peer cities in violent crime. Chronic budget shortfalls and the ...Read more

Decision by decision, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority is hardening America’s division into a two-tier society. The result is that even as racial minorities are growing into a majority of the nation’s future students, workers, taxpayers and voters, the court’s new rules are entrenching the dominance of White people in the ...Read more

Remember when Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were saying that tens of millions of dead people received Social Security benefits?

It was pretty clear from the outset that this claim, which implied that the Social Security Administration could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year just by removing the deceased from its rolls, was ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.

From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portland and New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.

That includes 13 ...Read more

Pop quiz: Who said this?

“For too long, we’ve allowed individuals like Elon Musk to pretend as if concerns of efficiency and waste are that of the right-wing, when in fact they should be the bedrock of any progressive politics.”

You might logically answer former ambassador and now presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel, or maybe Illinois Gov....Read more

To say that President Donald Trump is unfazed by Saturday's nationwide "No Kings" rally, which vies for bragging rights as perhaps the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, is the sort of understatement too typical when describing his monarchical outrages.

Leave aside Trump's grotesque mockery of the protests — his post that night of an...Read more

On Monday, millions of internet users got a painful answer to a question few even knew to exist. The question was: What do Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, United and Delta airlines and countless other web-based sites and services have in common?

The answer is: They were all brought down by a cascading glitch at a data center in northern ...Read more

The Trump administration and conservative politicians have launched a broad-reaching and effective campaign against higher education and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in particular. These attacks, often amplified by neo-conservative influencers, are not simply critiques of policy or spending. At their core, they reflect anxiety ...Read more

In October, many of us revisit favorite monster movies and slip into fun costumes—but some legends expose a darker side of humanity.

Elizabeth Báthory was a countess who allegedly tortured young women, then bathed in their blood to preserve her youth—a true symbol of vampirish vanity.

Centuries later, some beauty rituals are still ...Read more