Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

About Janet Hopson

Janet Hopson is a contributor to Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Psychology Today. She teaches science writing at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?

Baby with Book

THE VIDEO CLIP on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad’s, or training to be our future ... Read More