Whatever else they do, school-issued laptops encourage kids to retreat into their own lairs. And that can't be good for them or their families. That might be an acceptable cost if we knew that laptop programs were helping kids learn. But the truth is that we don't. For every study demonstrating a slight increase in achievement as a result of one-to-one computing programs, there's a study showing no effect at all. In one especially extensive study in 2004, Texas researchers found no significant difference in test scores between 21 middle schools that gave students laptops and an equal number that didn't. But students consistently report that laptops enhance learning. And so do school boards, which hold the purse string

What made America? What makes us? These two questions are at the heart of the new PBS series Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Harvard scholar turns to the latest tools of genealogy and genetics to explore the family histories of 12 renowned Americans

Short accounts of everyday people's memories of the announcement of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

A`website that chronicles how the announcemnet of the Pearl Harbor attacks were made over the radio. It includes audio clips.

Commentator and broadcast news veteran Robert Trout was on the air from London on this day 58 years ago when the Japanese bombed the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He tells us what it was like being part of the newscast that first told Americans they had entered the Second World War.

How music created change in the Fifties and Sixties, but fails to today.

When times are tough, ingenuity's importance increases, as PBS's American Experience demonstrates both on the screen and in its operations, conserving resources as it stays relevant with a new, five-part series about the '30s. The 1930s, premiering tomorrow and running five consecutive Mondays at 9 p.m. on WHYY TV12, is fascinating in the way it draws parallels to these tough times, both the causes and the potential solutions

If "Broadway Melody" had a tune there wouldn't be anything to stop it from being another cinema "Fool." It's the first flash New York has had as to how the studios are going after musical comedy numbers and there's no question of the potent threat to the stage producers. The boys had better lift the body over to this 45th street corner and take a peck at the latest Hollywood menace.

A not so positive review of Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush

"The Gold Rush" is a distinct triumph for Charlie Chaplin from both the artistic and commercial standpoints, and is a picture certain to create a veritable riot at theatre box offices. It is the greatest and most elaborate comedy ever filmed, and will stand for years as the biggest hit in its field, just as "The Birth of a Nation" still withstands the many competitors in the dramatic class.

The Birth of a Nation" is the main title David Wark Griffith, the director-in-chief of the Mutual Film Corporation, gave to his picturized version of Thomas Dixon's story of the South, "The Clansman." It received its first New York public presentation in the Liberty theatre, New York, March 3. The daily newspaper reviewers pronounced it as the last word in picture making.

If only the powers that be at msnbc.com understood that Adolph Hitler actually was a man of peace, they wouldn't have acted so rashly in removing their site's link to a Pat Buchanan column essentially blaming England for World War II.

Most Americans want their children to grow up to be "colorblind" when it comes to race. As a result, many parents, particularly white ones, don't discuss race with their children at all. But research demonstrates that babies as young as six months can recognize racial differences. And as they get older, kids start mentally categorizing people based on their race, whether they've been taught to by their parents or not. In fact, the authors of the book NurtureShock argue that parents' silence on the question may be exacerbating the problem. In the absence of open discussions about the role of race in kids' lives, they draw their own conclusions, some of which would be horrifying to progressive parents.

It would seem to me that good parents would have the confidence to let their kids hear the speech, help them put it in context, and urge them to think for themselves - just like they should with everything else they hear in school. "I think our kids are a lot more mature than we give them credit for," Boyce says. "We don't need to shield them from ideas."

We don't know what to do with our monsters. But I submit that we owe it to Jaycee Dugard to learn.

The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke.

Sometimes there's no way to know at the end of the day if you won. Trying to figure it out can leave you staring out the window at 3 in the morning. This is why being a sports fan is so comforting. You might not know how you did last week, but you - and everybody else - knows how the Panthers did. There's a common frame of reference