Motoko Rich

Motoko Rich, New York Times education reporter, talks about the debate over universal Pre-K -- one of the proposals in the president's State of the Union.

Latino students now make up almost 25 percent of the country's public school population. But despite their numbers, young Latino readers still aren't seeing themselves in the books th...

Grappling with months or even years of unemployment, some older Americans are tapping into the one safety net that's meant not to be tapped into: social security. Motoko Rich, nationa...

Motoko Rich and Todd Zwillich discuss what's in store for the week ahead. On the list: several reports on economic indices, the campaigns' reactions to last week's poor job figures, t...

It’s been a week of mixed economic news. Gas prices are down; jobless claims are up; pending housing sales are up. While it's been hard to put a finger on whether the recovery is pr...

With less than a day before the current stopgap budget bill runs out, President Obama met with Congressional leaders to try to prevent a government shutdown. But politicians are not just worried about the fallout a shutdown could have for their 2012 campaign. There is also a worry about the economic ramifications, which would ripple down from Capital Hill to Wall Street and, ultimately, Main Street.

Consumer spending has been up since Christmas but that may change soon. Prices for everything from a new t-shirt to a new dishwasher are expected to go up. This comes on the backs of increases in commodities; prices for cotton, copper, corn are hitting the highest levels in years.

Sarah Palin now stands victorious over a sinister array of dark conspiracies. We’re not talking about the media or liberals, though: Palin’s win is over best-selling author Dan Brown....

As more news stories get reported and updated multiple times a day online, they've made once-daily newspaper deadlines seem quaint. Book publishing, however, is still back in the Dark...

After four years of delay, next Tuesday will see the release of the book "The Lost Symbol," writer Dan Brown's much anticipated follow-up to the "Da Vinci Code." The novel will contin...

While newspapers and magazines have lined their pages with details of Bernie Madoff's deceit, the literary world is still trying to cash in on the embezzlement drama. The sixth book o...

Irish Author Frank McCourt died yesterday of cancer in New York City. He was 78. McCourt was best known for his book "Angela's Ashes," a memoir about his impoverished Irish childhood,...

Reading and Tests (89106) Motoko Rich, cultural reporter for the New York Times,, looks at how low reading rates among students will bring test scores down.
Then, Maura Spiegel, associate professor at Columbia and Barnard and Ross Posnock, professor of American Literature at Columbia University and author of ...