A new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture finds that over 17 million American families — nearly 1 in 8 — went hungry at some point in the last year. The figures include as many as one million children. The family hardships of our current Great Recession inevitably recall stories of the Great Depression, an era when many Americans came of age scrimping and saving every penny and every last crumb. So how will the experiences of the children of the Great Recession compare to those who were kids during the Great Depression? 

“Zora and Me” fictionalizes the childhood of the Harlem Renaissance writer, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. (Hurston was born in 1891, lived through the Jim Crow south, and died in 1960.) The young adult novel is the first in a planned trilogy which imagines Hurston as a girl detective in her all-black hometown of Eatonville, Florida, at the start of the 20^th century.

Today, a new movie called "The Kids are All Right" hits theaters, and for A.O. Scott, film critic from The New York Times, it inspired him to ask: “are the kids REALLY all right?”

In a new article called “They Grow Up So Quickly, Don’t They?”, he looks at this summer’s new releases that speak to the state of childhood and adolescence and family today.

Last week, we were struck by the shocking story of a six-year-old girl in Oregon whose death has been labeled a suicide. We wondered: Is it really possible for a first-grader to suffer from suicidal tendencies? And to deliberately take her own life?