Abby Schachter is a writer and policy commentator who contributed to The Weekly Standard between 2014 and 2016. Her articles for the magazine covered a range of domestic policy topics, including consumer safety regulation, government welfare programs like SNAP, and cultural issues such as children's play and rehabilitation. She is the author of "No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Out of Parenting," reflecting her interest in the intersection of family life and public policy.
"There's a massive problem with their logic," Shihan Qu told an audience, two years ago, about the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission's attempt to ban his product, Zen Magnets. Two days before Thanksgiving, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Qu and smacked the regulatory agency…
"There’s a massive problem with their logic," Shihan Qu told an audience, two years ago, about the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission's attempt to ban his product, Zen Magnets. Two days before Thanksgiving, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Qu and smacked the regulatory agency…
Youngwood, Penn.
A wave of sanity has finally hit some judges, legislators, and medical professionals on the issue of vaccination and the enforcement of effective standards for protecting the public from disease. Years of false claims against immunization, which led directly to the revival of certain diseases and…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village, and given what's written there, Clinton must be sorry she isn't running for president of Scotland. After all, the Scots have been rolling out a law that implements much of her argument, namely that government—or "the…
Monday through Friday, when our four kids come home from school they want a snack. Now, what I give them to eat is always a balancing act between competing interests. Do I offer them something to tide them over until dinner; get them out of the kitchen as soon as possible so I can make dinner;…
Pittsburgh
"You know, I’d really had a nightmare about this, but I didn’t realize they would do it. I didn’t think they would. The kids must be terrified.” So exclaimed Danielle Meitiv of Silver Spring, Maryland, to free-range-parenting godmother Lenore Skenazy. The “they” in this case are the…
On its 40th anniversary, it is instructive to read Midge Decter’s utterly immediate and yet classic Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975). The immediacy comes from her observations about what was then a new way of childrearing, the effects of which have lasted and are prevalent today. At the…
Scan the television listings and you’ll find quite a few shows based on older source material. There’s Gotham, which imagines the lives of Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the villains before the comic book. There’s Sleepy Hollow, which has Ichabod Crane traveling 250 years through time to unravel…
As Nicole Curtis says at the beginning of every episode of her number-one HGTV show Rehab Addict, “I’m not your average flipper. . . . I don’t just renovate, I restore old homes to their former glory.”
Julie Gunlock is one mother who’ll welcome the return of pink slime. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, the beef product processed from scraps left over from butchered cattle all but disappeared two years ago when critics on social media and television turned the filler—colorfully known…
Three crusading filmmakers intent on doing stories that no one else will touch have moved on from a truth-telling documentary about natural-gas extraction to a planned TV movie about the man they’ve dubbed “America’s worst serial killer.” By the looks of it, plenty of people want the movie to be…
Cass Sunstein had to be the happiest academic in America following President Obama’s recent State of the Union address. After all, in just four short years he got his analysis of how people need help making good choices—a nudge in the right direction he likes to call it—from manuscript to a brand…
Serial entrepreneur Mike Lanza can’t believe what’s happened to childhood. Growing up in suburban Pittsburgh, Lanza spent hours after school, outside and unsupervised, playing with neighborhood kids of different ages. Today, practically the opposite is the case. Kids hardly spend any time outside,…