Blog

In case you don't know what makes for healthy sleep habits, a U.S.-based expert panel has defined them for you in a new report. The key indicators include: sleeping at least 85 percent of the total time spent in bed; falling asleep within 30 minutes or less; waking up no more than once a night; and being awake for 20 minutes or less after initially falling asleep. The National Sleep Foundation report also outlined research needed to identify and describe more indicators of good sleep quality...

Note: While we don't all share the same politics or faith perspectives, I think there are some universally wonderful messages in this post . I've heard lots of my friends struggling about how to show up in the world, how to improve the world and how to balance life and work and health and home. So much is urgent and upsetting and serious which is many of us feel upset and urgent are so serious. If we're contending with ACEs or toxic stress or adverse community events and environments, past...

There are numerous entities in this community working on initiatives to close the faucet spewing a toxic mixture of conditions that negatively impact poor families and the children in those families. These efforts are mostly designed to plug the pipeline of adverse childhood experiences that result in children not reaching their full potential. That means stabilizing families by developing strategies to meet a family’s specific needs. Agape Child and Family Services received a major boost in...

Legislators from both sides of the aisle found points of agreement on health care issues Saturday as they discussed Medicaid, child services and mental health care, and the need for better community psychiatric services in North Carolina. A capacity crowd of 400 filled UNC-Chapel Hill’s Friday Center for the 39th annual Legislative Breakfast on Mental Health, which featured a panel of two Republicans and four Democrats who agreed that more uninsured people in North Carolina need health...

If you asked 17-year-old Newark, N.J. resident Naseer Wilkerson to describe what his neighborhood looks like at night, he couldn’t do it. That’s because he hasn’t seen it for years. He maps the most direct route, Monday through Friday, between the apartment he shares with his mom to his high school a few blocks away and then over to his friend Daniel’s house to do homework or play video games. Naseer—a Boy Scout and an aspiring video game creator—says he avoids being outside as much as...

We are doing a great job of passing our prejudices down to our kids. That’s the key takeaway from a newly published study , which finds considerable bias against Arab Muslims among Americans between the ages of six and 11. Arab Muslims — whether described as American citizens or immigrants— were seen in negative, stereotyped terms, in spite of the fact only 11 percent of the kids knew the word “Muslim” referred to a religion. Negative assumptions predated even rudimentary knowledge of the...

In late September, 1955, international attention came briefly to rest on the small town of Money, Mississippi, and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in nearby Sumner. Two white men from Money tortured and murdered Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy visiting from Chicago, and sank his body in the Tallahatchie River. Soon after, in Sumner, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted them of all charges. A week after the trial, The Nation reported that “the crowds are gone and this...

Last week, I wrote about new research spearheaded by Yale University that, for the first time ever, mapped urban settlements from 3700 B.C. to 2000 A.D. Now, Max Galka at Metrocosm has created a fun video using that digitized and geocoded dataset. In the Yale-led paper, published in Scientific Data , the authors wrote about the significance of their work: Whether it is for timely response to catastrophes, the delivery of disaster relief, assessing human impacts on the environment, or...

By the time the mid-2020s roll around, the Hudson Yards development will have completely upended New York City. Sixteen skyscrapers, one taller than the Empire State Building , will encompass more than 17 million square feet of new residential, commercial, and retail space. The mega-development will also feature two soon-to-be architectural stars along Manhattan’s West Side: a slick performing-arts venue dubbed the Culture Shed , designed by hot-shots Diller Scofidio + Renfro, along with...

I had a tremendous amount of response from many of you to my blog post last week about TRE (tension, stress & trauma release exercise) . So I’ve decided to continue with that theme this week! There are lots of benefits to TRE, but the main reason I love it is because it helped me realize the complex relationship between my muscles, brain, and nervous system. These three kept me safe as a child, and they have continued to protect me during the dark, messy parts of my healing journey. TRE...

Every medicine has the possibility of harmful side effects, but for painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, that potential is perhaps more dramatic than most. So you might think that, when prescribing such drugs, doctors select their patients carefully. But, according to new research, that’s not the case. A growing body of studies finds that those with mental-health diagnoses such as anxiety, depression, alcohol and other drug addictions, and even opioid addictions are far more likely than...

Every day an estimated 1,500 family members and friends of those incarcerated on New York’s Rikers Island visit their loved ones. The only way on and off the island for visitors is to take the Q100 bus across the bridge. For several months, Queen-based photographer Salvador Espinoza rode the bus back and forth, documenting the stories of the people, mostly women and children, who visit the more than 10,000 people who are detained each day at the jail. He recently exhibited his photography,...