People love guys who write constitutions. Their genius is celebrated by historians, their intentions debated by judges, their names attached to poorly performing middle schools. I figured I would never know that glory. Because no matter how good my columns may be, they will never cause people to stop drinking and then start drinking again shortly afterward, except for me while I write them. And not always. But after the financial crash in Iceland, the new Prime Minister decided to ...

In his first interview with TIME, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with reporter Laura Locke to talk about Facebook's rapid growth spurt, IPO rumors, future plans and the pressures of being a 23-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley. TIME: Facebook is undergoing a huge period of growth. With more than 150,000 new users signing up daily, it is growing three times as fast as rival MySpace. What do you attribute that spike to? Zuckerberg: For a while we actually constrained our growth. ...

This fall, young girls in China's southern Guangdong province will be learning a new subject in school: how to avoid becoming a mistress. Although Chairman Mao kept a stable of women at his disposal, extramarital peccadilloes were frowned upon during China's more fervent socialist years. But as economic reforms have helped Guangdong become one of the nation's wealthiest regions, the province has been beset by a flood of ernai, literally, "second breast," as mistresses are commonly known ...

Should we condemn students to mediocrity just to avoid the risk that they will fail a tougher challenge? That's what American public schools tend to do, argues Mary Catherine Swanson. Afraid of high dropout rates and low standardized test scores, many schools allow all but their top students to muddle through remedial and feel-good classes instead of preparing them for the rigors of college. No wonder so many parents want vouchers to send their kids to private schools. The dangers ...

A year after the poisonings, public confidence is restoredOne year ago last week, James Burke made a decision that will probably be studied in business schools for a long time to come. Going against the advice of Government agents and some of his own colleagues, the chairman of Johnson & Johnson decided to spend whatever millions it would cost to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves across the U.S. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration feared that the recall would increase ...

AT their classical best. Catholic colleges and universities are bountiful providers of sound lawyers, doctors, civil servants, teachers. A half-dozen schools, besides Notre Dame, are outstanding: Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown University boasts a famed School of Foreign Service, about half its students non-Catholic, and graduates officers for the State Department and diplomatic posts abroad. President: the Very Rev. Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Most famous former student : Lyndon Johnson. Also in the "Catholic Ivy League," and considered by many ...

What are the sources of Protestant-Roman Catholic tension in the U.S.? Last week the Jesuit weekly America listed three areas of friction in a lead article by Editor in Chief Thurston N. Davis. The sore points as Jesuit Davis sees them: BIRTH CONTROL. "Some Protestants speak of birth control as a positive virtue. They are hurt and perhaps humiliated that their code of personal morality in this matter is held to be grossly wrong by their Catholic friends. The ...

A new report being released today will add to the debate about the Knowledge Is Power Program or KIPP schools — a highly influential non-profit network of public schools serving low-income students. The study is important because it's the first large-scale look at the college completion rate for students in schools at the leading edge of today's reform efforts. The results show that while KIPP graduates—who are 95 percent African-American and Latino and overwhelmingly low-income—far ...

The normal high school curriculum is a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where ...

Pain is one of the most common reasons that people end up in the doctor's office. And yet, until 1983, the field of pain management did not have its own medical society; today, the specialty still isn't widely taught in medical schools. For centuries, doctors even debated whether eliminating pain was morally acceptable: would it, for instance, defeat God's purpose in condemning Eve's daughters to suffer in childbirth? Decisions about a patient's pain treatment are now made much ...