Joanna Reed, Paula England, Krystale Littlejohn, and Brooke Conroy examine in-depth interviews with over 50 unmarried women in their twenties to uncover why sexually active men and women who aren't desiring a pregnancy so often fail to practice contraception consistently.

The decades between 1970 and 2010 bracket a critically important period in the history of race and gender relations in the United States. Landmark court decisions and innovative legislation were starting to dismantle the most oppressive features of the American racial hierarchy in the years just prior to 1970. At the same time, women entered the paid labor force in record numbers. Gender discrimination became a recognized problem and outlawed by federal legislation.

Jack Shonkoff describes how poverty really does get under the skin, how it harms the cognitive development of children exposed to it, and what we can do to break this entrenched cycle.

The United States purports to have an unusually strong commitment to equal opportunity, yet surprisingly it hasn't collected the mobility data needed to reliably monitor whether that commitment is being upheld. Although mobility and opportunity cannot of course be equated, it's widely understood that mobility data provide fundamental evidence on opportunity, which is why virtually all late industrial countries, save the U.S., have well-developed systems for monitoring mobility. It's not as if the U.S. is a more general laggard in developing social indicators.

The question that animates this paper is whether a standardized protocol for measuring the amount and contours of intergenerational mobility in the United States might usefully be established. Thoughout our discussion, we understand "intergenerational mobility" to refer to the association between (a) the social standing of an individual’s family of origin (as assessed when the individual is growing up), and (b) the social standing of that same individual when she or he is an adult.