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Since January 25, after sunset, the shades on a window-walled gallery in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village have rolled up, and the sidewalk outside has been cast in a cool, blue glow. The color comes from a four-and-a-half-hour-long video of ice cores. Inside the gallery, scanned images of samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet are on a continuous loop, representing 110,000 years of accumulation. Watching the footage gives the impression of descending through the ice core and into the past. The...

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.—This community was still reeling from the recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news. Amazon, the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000 people here.“This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris told a local newspaper at the time. In the months and years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its...

National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP) Partners for Vulnerable Youth is hoping to educate healthcare providers on the warning signs for human trafficking of children in a series of three continuing education courses. "Human Trafficking 101" is the first course , which will attempt to educate providers not only about signs that a child may be a victim of human trafficking, but also to recognize situations that make children particularly vulnerable to human trafficking...

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," wrote Edward Abbey, the famously misanthropic environmental activist, in 1968. To call Abbey—who celebrated eco-sabotage and advocated banning cars in National Parks—a pessimist would be understating the matter. Today, though, his words seem prescient. Twentieth-century economics was built on the mantra that growth is good—and more growth is even better. The famous Kuznets curve , which appeared in 1955, purported to show...

Welfare reform is back. President Trump signaled its return to the forefront of national policy debates in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, when he announced a plan to “lift our citizens from welfare to work.” He shouldn’t have trouble finding support for it: With a collective of pro-reform officials leading key agencies, and with longtime entitlement crusader Paul Ryan as speaker of the House, the GOP in 2018 will have its best chance in a generation to make major changes to the...

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACE, are becoming an increasingly common method used by social workers and doctors to detect the likelihood of a child becoming an addict. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association is a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agency that leads public efforts to advance the behavioral health of the nation. SAMHSA defines adverse childhood experiences as stressful or traumatic events, including abuse and neglect. They may also include...

It began like any other spring day. I woke up in my apartment in Queens and went about my daily ritual of preparing a batch of coffee and watching the morning news. Then my plan was to wake up my daughters and get them ready for school. The sun was shining and so was my spirit, because I was just one week away from completing my master’s degree in social work. I had meticulously planned every step toward obtaining it, ever since I had been incarcerated. That included working at various...

As lawmakers face another deadline this week for passing legislation to keep the federal government open, one of the outstanding issues is long-term funding for a key health care safety-net program. The Community Health Center program serves 27 million people at almost 10,000 nonprofit clinics nationwide, almost all of which are in low-income rural and urban areas. Congress has allocated $3.6 billion annually to the health centers in recent years. That represents about 20 percent of the...

To age well, we must eat well. There has been a lot of evidence that heart-healthy diets help protect the brain. The latest good news: A study recently published in Neurology finds that healthy seniors who had daily helpings of leafy green vegetables — such as spinach, kale and collard greens — had a slower rate of cognitive decline, compared to those who tended to eat little or no greens. "The association is quite strong," says study author Martha Clare Morris , a professor of nutrition...

The need for students to learn about racism in American society existed long before I began teaching a course called “White Racism” at Florida Gulf Coast University earlier this year. I chose to title my course “ White Racism ” because I thought it was scholarly and succinct, precise and powerful. But others saw it differently. Many White Americans (and some people of color) became upset when they learned about this course. [For more on this story by Ted Thornhill, go to...

This month, The Takeaway invited Rebecca Carroll , producer of special projects at WNYC, to host a special book club for us. It’s called “Reading the Reckoning,” and over the next few weeks Carroll will introduce listeners to a number of women authors who are expressing their strength, conviction, rage and joy through writing. This week's book is, " So You Want To Talk About Race ," by Ijeoma Oluo . Future installments will include, " This Will Be My Undoing ," by Morgan Jerkins, " The Dawn...

(This is a written version of a presentation I gave at our January Meeting.) For the past year, Sonoma County ACEs Connection worked to make more people aware of Adverse Childhood Experiences. But especially after the big fires, it feels important to also talk about resilience. I want to start a discussion about simple resilience techniques that anyone could apply in their work, social and/or personal life. This is not new information, because the best resilience methods have been used by...