On a warm Saturday in late May 2008, my wife, Ann, talked me into going to an auditorium in Baltimore to watch a lottery. It was no ordinary lottery. Numbered balls were cranked out of a bingo machine, and the winners got a ticket to a better life. It...
Kimberley Enyart was never interested in doing recreational drugs. But then she was in a car accident and her doctor prescribed a powerful opiate for the pain. "It just would put me off in la-la land, and make me feel better," she says. "I...
On a recent afternoon, Brittany Combs drove a white SUV through a neighborhood at the northern end of Austin, Indiana. In the back of her vehicle, there were hundreds of sterile syringes, each in a plastic wrapper. "Anybody need clean needles...
When Grace McClellan attends two music festivals — Governors Ball in New York and Bonnaroo in Tennessee — this month, she will be among friends who feel more like family. Their shared bond, along with a love of live music:...
Volunteer: Be the voice for a child that doesn’t have one! Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area CASA National volunteer opportunities Job description Nearly 9000 children are reported abused or neglected...
Sleep may be a missing piece in the Alzheimer's disease puzzle. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found compelling evidence that poor sleep - particularly a deficit of the deep, restorative slumber...
In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to...
It's time for helicopter parents to land and stay grounded. New research by professors at Brigham Young University revealed that parental warmth cannot neutralize the consequences of helicopter parenting . Additionally, a lack of...
Elyn Saks has a story that millions of people hide from their friends, their co-workers and even their families. But she wants the world to know about it. Saks suffers from a serious mental disorder. She has schizophrenia. “Everything...
The fastest way to fight poverty is to redirect money from higher-income to lower-income people. In the meantime, behavioral scientists have some tips on how the present system can do a better job of helping the poor. Last month,...
Ten years ago, Dr. Gary Bloch examined dozens of the city’s poor on the lawn before Queen’s Park, and prescribed them money. Amid the political theatre, he was filling out vague provincial “special diet” forms, which...
Native American youth living on reservations can often face an overwhelming array of challenges, including poverty, addiction and abuse. Partly because of hurdles, high school dropout rates and suicides are far higher on...
We've always known that people around the world smoke, drink and use illegal drugs. But we've never known just how much people abuse substances, nor have we known whether illegal or legal drugs do more harm to human health — until now....
Comedian Eddie Pepitone once said—and I'm paraphrasing here—that there are no great neighborhoods in Los Angeles, only great blocks. The stretch of Echo Park on Sunset Boulevard between Glendale and Logan is one. The establishments...
It's after hours at Rafael Hernandez, an elementary school in the Bronx, and room 421 is in an uproar. It's what you would expect from a sixth-grade sex education class learning how to put a condom on. Sex education. The very concept...