Ki Ann Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used to rail against the scientists who weren’t producing enough useful information about schizophrenia. Her brother suffers...
The trailer where Dylann Roof found refuge is faded yellow with a thousand tiny dents. It is on the western edge of Columbia, S.C., along an unpaved road strewn with damp garbage, and it is where Roof briefly lived until the day he allegedly...
By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family . He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly...
In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men and how it's become a normal life event. "We've chosen the response of the deprivation of...
Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin...
In anticipation of Pope Francis' visit to the U.S., a national advocacy campaign is underway. Pope Francis’ call for compassion for those in poverty extends beyond acts of charity and mercy. Our fundamental concern for human dignity...
As a medical student, Damon Tweedy noticed that many of the diseases he learned about in class were more prevalent among black people than white people, and that the black patients often fared worse than their white counterparts. Tweedy, now a...
A few years ago, a good friend and I were walking near downtown Philadelphia, not far from my old elementary school, Thomas C. Durham, on 16th and Lombard. The school was built on the edge of a black neighborhood in South Philly in the early...
The Supreme Court seems eager to hear a case on the constitutionality of a distinctively American form of punishment: prolonged solitary confinement. “Years on end of near total isolation exact a terrible price,” Justice Anthony M....
Norman Francis was just a few years into his tenure as president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a small Catholic institution in New Orleans, when a report that came across his desk alarmed him. It was an accounting of the nation’s...
America's childhood poverty numbers aren't pretty, but they are even uglier than you might think. Take a snapshot of the U.S. today, and you'll find that 22 percent of all children live in families that are below the federal poverty...
As he ordered a salmon salad for lunch at a downtown hotel on Thursday, Leon Williams looked out the window and reflected how much San Diego had changed since he arrived here in 1941. Almost all the buildings in view along Broadway were built...
When Michael Hollister was tasked with creating a hunger heat map for the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., the initial hot spots were right where everyone expected—the District’s poor...
The minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.54 per hour , after adjusting for inflation. The current $7.25 is far too low for the 3 million hourly workers who earn at or below that threshold, and certainly not at...
On Friday , I shared 15 ways we can boost our health and well-being, which have nothing to do with weight. Health is very personal, and how you define health is entirely up to you. My intention is to show that there are many, many ways we...