Last year, Kalief Browder allowed me to interview him many times about his experience in the New York City criminal-justice system. At sixteen, he had been arrested in the Bronx for a robbery that he insisted he hadn’t committed. He...
Jacob Lawrence was a painter, but he was also a storyteller of the first order. In his 1941 masterwork, “Migration Series,” Lawrence (1917-2000) unspools one of the foundational narratives of the modern United States: the journey...
The stories that have been shared herein recently, e.g., regarding trauma-informed education models, are stories about folks practicing 'eulogy virtues' as defined in this great piece by David Brooks in the New York Times. http://nyti.ms/1Fy2QmR...
In 1946, a malaria outbreak across the Southern U.S. catalyzed the formation of what would eventually become the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then in 2002, China's CDC began its operations just as an outbreak of Severe Acute...
I HAD heard about all of the dying, about all of the grief, and still I didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing when, at a railroad crossing here, I spotted a man in a blaring orange vest, the kind that road crews and...
It's just the crumb of a muffin, but Martha Galvis must pick it up. Lips clenched, eyes narrowed, she pushes it back and forth across a slick table, then in circles. "I struggle and struggle until," Galvis pauses, concentrating all her...
In South Korea, grim stories of teen suicide come at a regular clip. Recently, two 16-year-old girls in the city of Daejeon jumped to their deaths, leaving a note saying, "We hate school." It's just one tragedy in a country where suicide is the...
There is rare consensus among inmate advocates and correction officials that the surest way to fix the Rikers Island jail complex is to empty it. While Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is not prepared to go that far, he and the state’s...
The last time Kenneth Seay lost his job, at an industrial bakery that offered health insurance and Christmas bonuses, it was because he had been thrown in jail for legal issues stemming from a revoked driver’s license. Same with the three...
Everly Dickerd's death is a tragedy. The 3-month-old recently died as a result of injuries due to head trauma. Her baby sitter has been charged with child abuse that led to those injuries. Sadly, Everly is not the only child to die from child...
City elections in Memphis begin unadorned. Yard signs don’t bloom until mid- to late summer, when the strategic use of television ads and the much higher cycle of radio advertising kick in. Even by those standards, Jim Strickland’s...
Concerns surrounding drug and alcohol consumption are widely discussed in relation to youth but, according to a University of Adelaide researcher, there is a need to explore this issue further with older Australians. Dr Lynette Cusack, from the...
Last summer, the Michigan town of Grosse Pointe Park erected a farmer's market in the middle of one of the few remaining streets that allowed cars to pass between the tony suburb and the urban Detroit neighborhoods at its border. It was the...
By now, researchers have well established the benefits of trees in urban neighborhoods. Trees are correlated with better health outcomes. They mitigate the urban heat-island effect and lower energy bills. They raise overall property values. But...
Public tolerance for laws and practices that discriminate against LGBT people under the guise of religion has rapidly declined. President Obama last week called for an end to so-called conversion therapies that seek to “fix” LGBT youth in...