It all starts with the kids’ stories: Sammy’s biological mom, a crack addict, gave him up when he was 10 months old. He later ended up selling drugs to help his adoptive family avoid eviction, again. Sofia’s parents were deported,...
Analyn Megison could remember smelling her own blood as she fought off her attacker. The law school graduate was 29 years old when she was beaten and raped until she fell unconscious. The attack, committed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2003, was...
In March 2012, police responded to a call from a Brooklyn public school about a five-year old autistic boy who was having a tantrum. Officers held down the kindergartener, who was then tied to a stretcher and transported to a hospital. The...
A client of mine, who I’ll call Deanna, was a 15-year-old in the ninth grade at a public high school in North Carolina. She lived with her mother, who was unemployed, and two younger brothers in government-subsidized housing. She had never been...
I was 13, and my girlfriends and I had just begun to hang out with some older boys. It was the summer before the eighth grade, and they were 16, going to be juniors, and they had a car. We’d hang out late at night, each telling our mothers that...
Michael George Patterson, a 59-year-old Native Alaskan, stood before a group of high school students on a recent morning and told them about his impending death. Sooner or later, he said, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or another...
Running more than 15 miles a week may reduce the risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease, new research suggests. Walking can help, too, if the amount of energy expended is equivalent to running more than 15 miles weekly, the study found. "Exercise...
Anyone who believes in progressive drug policy reform and in embracing a more humanistic system of care would agree that we are living in a time when amazing things are happening. Both the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the Drug Policy...
Quitting smoking sets off a series of changes in the brain that Penn Medicine researchers say may better identify smokers who will start smoking again—a prediction that goes above and beyond today's clinical or behavioral tools for assessing...
Even the most trivial of emergency-room trips can quickly add up. Going in for an upper respiratory infection averages more than $1,000 . A urinary tract infection can set patients back thousands of dollars. But before Obamacare came on the...
A s a civil rights attorney, Constance Rice [co-founder of the Advancement Project] became known in the 1990s for, as she puts it, going to war with the Los Angeles Police Department. Rice filed lawsuits against the department, mainly over their treatment of minorities in underprivileged communities. Here are a couple of excerpts from the interview: On whether or not racism plays a factor in police force : He [the police officer] doesn't feel like it's racism. The black...
If your children’s school seems to suddenly be devoting its time and resources to something called SEL, it may be leaving you wondering what happened to good old reading, writing and arithmetic (or even that new darling, coding)....
On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 killing of Eric Garner, the second no-indictment decision in a major police-involved homicide in...
When you go to bed, and how long you sleep at a time, might actually make it difficult for you to stop worrying. So say Jacob Nota and Meredith Coles of Binghamton University in the US, who found that people who sleep for shorter periods of time and...
If Danielle Goodwin had taken the Adverse Childhood Experiences Test as a teenager, she would have scored a perfect 10. The ACES test was developed in 1998 by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Kaiser Permanente in...