Hanna Rosin

Ideas of the Year 2013

Young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. What will it mean for their development?

The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women, who seemingly have little choice but to participate. Actually, it is an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.

A woman who wants to make it home for dinner shouldn't have to sneak out of the office. More »

Assessing fall's crop of sitcoms about men who are unemployed, underemployed, or in desperate need of a makeover. With this fall network season, I will reach the pinnacle of my cultural influence. I know this because it was reported in a June Wall Street Journal in a story titled "A Generation of TV Wimps," which was sent to me by a friend. A CBS executive is quoted as saying that 20 different producers came to… More »

A happiness guru says the world's most-notorious terrorist was both evil and content with life More »

Dubbed the “Daddy Party” 20 years ago, the GOP suddenly finds itself challenged from within by a wave of conservative women, from Sarah Palin and her “mama grizzlies” to Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party leadership. As an Indian American woman, Nikki Haley broke two barriers to become the governor of South Carolina. Was her hard-won victory over the state’s good-ol’-boy establishment a fluke, or a sign of fundamental change in the Republican Party?

The space-shuttle program is coming to a quiet end. Is the same true for the era of space exploration?

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

In certain overachieving circles, breast-feeding is no longer a choice—it’s a no-exceptions requirement, the ultimate badge of responsible parenting. Yet the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates. Is breast-feeding right for every family? Or is it this generation’s vacuum cleaner—an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down?

Since he could speak, Brandon, now 8, has insisted that he was meant to be a girl. This summer, his parents decided to let him grow up as one. His case, and a rising number of others like it, illuminates a heated scientific debate about the nature of gender—and raises troubling questions about whether the limits of child indulgence have stretched too far.

Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.

The movie version of Philip Pullman's Golden Compass creates a luminous fantasy world, but loses the book's magnetic force of meaning

It took five years, two screenwriters, and $180 million to turn a best-selling antireligious children’s book into a star-studded epic—just in time for Christmas.

How a pair of Democratic strategists are helping candidates talk about their faith

Fifty years ago, yoga was the province of California communes and fringy New Agers. Now it’s teetering on the brink of overexposure and commodification. So, is it a spiritual antidote to the upscale Western lifestyle, or just the latest manifestation?