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By Hannah Fry, Illustration: Patrick Hruby/Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2023 When my son was about 2 months old, I figured I just had an extended case of the postpartum “baby blues.” It’s a right of passage of sorts for many new moms that comes with mood swings, crying, anxiety and difficulty sleeping — which seems like a particularly cruel joke. I wish I realized earlier that it was much more. My son will be 3 years old this summer and I can’t help but feel a little sad...

By Usha Lee McFarling, Illustration: ADOBE, STAT, July 12, 2023 T he nation’s widespread racial health disparities won’t be erased without changes to how health care systems are funded and accredited, more public and financial accountability for poor patient outcomes, and more work to overturn the income inequality and residential segregation tied to poorer health and lower life expectancy for many people who are Black and brown. Those are some of the conclusions of health equity experts who...

By Jia Tolentino, Illustration: Shuhua Xiong, The New Yorker, July 10, 2023 Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. At home, the TV was often tuned to Fox News, where he heard a lot of rants about liberal hypocrisy, but he didn’t consider himself political. After high school, he began working for his family’s construction business. He had no intention of going to college until he realized that he didn’t want to spend his adulthood doing manual labor in the tropical heat. In college, as a...

By Dylan Scott, Illustration: Julianna Brion/Vox, Vox, June 23, 2023 Joslyn Conchas grew up with a single mom in Fresno, slipping in and out of poverty. She became interested in medicine while helping her grandfather pick ticks off their dogs and started dreaming of becoming a vet. Then her grandpa got sick, afflicted by high cholesterol and heart disease, and she began thinking about taking care of people instead. She saw how hard it was for her grandfather, who spoke only Spanish, to...

Charlie rests while listening to a sermon before being admitted to lunch at the Hope Center on June 21, 2022 in Hagerstown, Maryland. The Hope Center, which has been assisting homeless and addicted men and women in the Hagerstown community since 1955, continues to see a steady stream of people in need. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images By Chris Hedges, The Real News Network, July 14, 2023 Some 50 million people in the United States live in poverty today—and over 108 million people survive...

By Tina Chelidze, Photo: Suzanne Tucker/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, July 11, 2023 Housing policy and education policy can reinforce each other’s outcomes. Housing policy shapes the neighborhoods where schools are and those schools' student demographics . Education policy affects the quality of schools and the resources available to students, which then can affect housing prices and zoning patterns . Nevertheless, these policy areas suffer from misalignment across funding, governance, and...

By Karen Pennar, Photo Illustration: Hyacinth Empinado/STAT, STAT, July 18, 2023 I n Phoenix, where daytime temperatures are topping 110 degrees Fahrenheit for the third straight week, emergency room doctors think of extreme heat as the public health emergency it has proved itself to be: In 2022, Arizona’s Maricopa County reported a 25% increase in heat-related mortality from the previous year. “Heat is just something we know we need to be really worried about,” said Geoff Comp, an emergency...

The predominantly Black Fifth Ward in Evanston, Ill. The Chicago suburb is preparing to pay reparations in the form of housing grants to Black residents who experienced housing discrimination. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar) By Chanelle Chandler, Yahoo! News, July 13, 2023 As talk of reparations ripples through the federal and local governments nationwide, Evanston, Ill., has become the first city in the United States to put money in the hands of Black residents affected by years of...

By Shiloh Krupar, Photo: Andy Vult/Unsplash, Next City, July 17, 2023 In this excerpt from “Health Colonialism,” geographer Shiloh Krupar examines the role of urban brownfields in health disparities and medical apartheid. In the early 1990s, big-city mayors and legislators from urban industrial states pressured Congress and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to start a pilot program to redevelop underutilized and damaged land in highly desirable urban infill areas. These...

Phoenix police continue to use an obscure and controversial ordinance to target people for "manifesting prostitution." Max Erwin By Katya Schwenk, Phoenix New Times, July 14, 2023 In January, a 23-year-old woman sat in Phoenix Municipal Court listening to a prosecutor lay out the evidence against her. On the night of her arrest, she was scantily dressed, the prosecutor told the judge. She also had condoms in her purse and got into a car with a man In Phoenix, that was enough to charge her...

As I read the following link, I became familiar with several parenting strategies to improve parent and child rapport and boundary setting. 1. Keep composure following a negative response to direction. 2. Allow the child to understand their feelings and emotions following the outburst. (Validate feelings) 3. Ensure the child clearly understands parental direction. 4. Understand how mutual respect and responses create an enjoyable parent and child relationship. ...

America's culture of child abuse and neglect negatively impacts every aspect of American life. During April 2022, co-hosts Ingrid Cockhren and Mathew Portell examined America's history of child abuse and neglect and outlined how this history connects to our current child abuse crisis. Please listen in on Thursday for an encore of part one of this series. The episode is dedicated to illuminating the systemic nature of child abuse and neglect in America. Cockhren and Portell discussed the...