Blog

Long stories, our malevolent trauma histories. Yet here we are. What does THAT mean - exactly? How did I GET - HERE - TODAY? I continue to ask.

One July afternoon in 1972, a team of psychologists took sound meters into the Bridge Apartments, a cluster of four high-rise buildings straddling Interstate 95 in Manhattan. Because of the towers’ proximity to the highway, the hum of traffic filled the buildings’ halls. Even on the eighth floor, the decibel level was 66 , just slightly quieter than a running vacuum cleaner . The noise died down as the researchers climbed the stairs, though. On the 32nd floor, the reading was 55 decibels, or...

A panel of 15 judges for the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 9-6 Wednesday that a photo voter-ID law passed by Texas almost five years ago discriminates against people of color . The Texas law, SB 14, would allow the use of drivers licenses and gun licenses to vote, but not college IDs . Experts testified in the years-long court battle over the law that it would potentially disenfranchise upwards of 600,000 eligible voters . Most of the disenfranchised would be Latino and...

When Lincoln High School government teacher Nathan Gibbs-Bowling teaches his Tacoma students about the Constitution, he adds a few lessons on survival skills. He wants them to understand their rights under the constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure by police. But he also wants his students to know how those powerful words can play out in real life. “I encourage them to assert their rights in an informed, responsible manner,” Gibbs-Bowling...

We asked a number of contributors to share their reactions to a post by activist and author Michelle Alexander that we published earlier this month in the aftermath of the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Here is a response from political organizer Marshall Ganz , a senior lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. You can view all other responses by clicking on the “ Building a New America ” tag. Sixty years ago, the...

Twelve-year old Anna has asthma. She lives in a low-income neighborhood and gets her care at a clinic affiliated with a major teaching hospital. Despite high-quality medical care, Anna’s asthma is not well controlled. Last year she missed almost two weeks of school, had two urgent care visits, and a brief but scary (and expensive) hospital stay. Her pediatrician believes that the old, rent-subsidized apartment where Anna’s family lives may be part of the problem: The presence of mold,...

As the November presidential election draws nearer, it is clear that for the first time in American history a woman will be the presidential candidate for a major political party. And while we have significant work to do to achieve true justice and equity, women overall experience more opportunity than they ever have. For many little girls growing up today, this country is looking more promising. But not all. Girls who have traditionally been marginalized — girls of color, those who grow up...

This week's Invisibilia podcast and show explore what happens when people flip the script, responding to situations in ways that are completely unexpected. We tend to respond to aggression with aggression, kindness with kindness. Usually that works just fine. But sometimes turning 180 degrees can change the world. Think Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. In this Invisibilia excerpt on NPR's Morning Edition, we tell the tale of a mellow Washington, D.C., dinner party that was suddenly...

The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn much-needed national and worldwide attention to the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of those sworn to protect them, igniting a long-overdue discussion about the systemic injustices African-Americans face in the realms of policing and criminal justice. As a society, however, we need to take that discussion a step further. We must acknowledge the obvious fact that black livesof all ages matter. Among other things, this means putting a stop to...

In 2012, when the New York Times reported that Google was offering its employees a chance to try out mindfulness techniques, the paper of record adopted a tone of befuddlement. “Sharing feelings?” the story asked; “Sitting quietly for long, unproductive minutes? At Google?” Four years later, workplace mindfulness initiatives are everywhere. When cloud computing giant Salesforce opened a new San Francisco tower this spring, it set aside a room on each floor as a device-free “mindfulness zone”...

If, as the idiom goes, money indeed does talk, then state and local governments in the United States have a very important announcement : They care more about felons than schoolchildren. That’s the alarming conclusion of a new report from the U.S. Department of Education, which shows that state and local government spending between 1979 and 2013 on incarcerating citizens has increased at three times the rate of expenditures on K-12 education for taxpayers—a 324 percent increase ($17 to $71...

Last summer, the high-school English teacher T.J. Whitaker revised the reading list for his contemporary literature course with the addition of a new title— The Savage City , a gritty nonfiction account of race and murder in New York City in the 1960s. The 24-year teaching veteran said he chose the book to give his students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, a chance to read “an honest depiction of the Black Panther Party and the corruption that existed in the NYPD during the...