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How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter

The Mommy Brain Blog

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Have you read your newspaper today?

This is such a scary week for the terrific people who work at the San Jose Mercury News. The paper belonged to the Knight-Ridder Newspapers chain -- until the chain was sold, and the new owner, Sacramento's McClatchy family, announced it would sell off the Mercury News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and 10 other papers.
Now there's a chance that the Mercury News -- so long a Bay Area standard of newspaper quality -- could be sold to a new owner with as little care for quality as for the people who produce it.
I'm biased, clearly. My first job was at the Mercury News, and I was lucky to work there when its ambitions were huge. Reporters were actually encouraged to work on investigative stories for months at a time; the whole idea seems dreamlike these days. Nowadays, with most papers losing circulation, layoffs are everywhere and people question the whole future of newspapers.
What does this have to do with mothers and brains? I grew up with newspapers always open on the kitchen table at breakfast. We'd all read and comment to each other about what was going on all over the world. How many families do that today? Yet it's so hard for me to imagine life without a newspaper-- the way it can surprise you, educate and delight you, the way it makes you part of a much larger world.
You look at the front page and see a patchwork of pictures of your government, your culture and faraway conflicts or trends that could change your life one day, all sewn together by smart people who've been arguing all day or all week about the relative importance or delight in each piece....there's simply nothing like it.
Being journalists by trade and newspaper lovers by nature, my husband and I keep papers on our kitchen table and comment to each other and our children on the constant surprises we find. It's a practice I wholeheartedly endorse for improving your mind, and your children's...........

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