April 2016

America’s criminal justice system is a patchwork of local, state, and federal policies that together resemble a maze with too many entrances and too few exits. When low-risk people enter this maze after arrest, pretrial policies can ruin their lives. One young man recently died in a New Hampshire jail after he was unable to post $100 bail. Jeffrey Pendleton, 26, was booked on March 8 on a marijuana possession charge, a misdemeanor for which a judge ordered the typical low-figure money bail.

When North Carolina lawmakers passed what is widely viewed as the most sweeping anti-LGBT law in the country, supporters said it was needed to fend off a potential wave of local laws like the transgender-friendly bathroom ordinance adopted by the city of Charlotte. Opponents have called the new law a “hostile takeover of human rights.” But all the attention on who can use toilets and locker rooms has overshadowed what employment rights advocates say is an even more expansive change made by...

When reflecting on the factors that derailed them academically, Quad’ir Ford and Nalik Lark-Hightower didn’t mention living in poverty or exposure to trauma as factors. But experts have said that these two distinct yet intertwined conditions in children’s lives can go far in explaining the root cause of the dropout crisis. “Trauma is not a singular event; neither is poverty,” said Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, executive director of the Philadelphia Youth Network and co-chair of Project U-Turn.

I'm a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in...

Once I asked a well-known academic researcher, psychologist and also business consultant in the field of emotional intelligence, David Caruso, why someone would organize others to fly planes into an office building. This was shortly after 911. His answer was, "Because they are evil". I will put a link to a discussion of that below. But for now I just want to say that what Jane is doing with Aces is trying to get a little closer to cause and effect. For example, thanks to Jane's work Jim...

Cardio-vascular disease. Obesity. Alcoholism. Diabetes. These conditions may have one surprising factor in common: childhood trauma -- according to a massive study called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACE. In part one of this series, a version of which was first broadcast in 2011, IDEAS producer Mary O'Connell explores the ACE study and how its findings are being integrated into medical practice today. Part 2 airs Thursday, April 14; Part 3 airs Thursday, April 21. (To listen to part...

Angela Duckworth was teaching math when she noticed something intriguing: The most successful students weren’t always the ones who displayed a natural aptitude; rather, they displayed something she came to think of as grit. Later, as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she defined the term — a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal — and created a tool to measure it: the “grit scale,” which predicted outcomes like who would...

Six-year-old Sophie says she has always known she's a girl. "I used to be Yoshi," she says. "But I didn't like being called Yoshi." And she didn't like being called a boy. Sophie lives with her family in Bellingham, Wash. Her mother, Jena Lopez, says she started seeing the signs before Sophie turned 2. "She'd say things like, 'I'm a she, not a he,' " Lopez says. "She would cry if we misgendered her. She'd become angry." Sophie's parents didn't know what to do. They didn't know if this was...

Issues that have been plaguing people behind closed doors take center stage when our stars let us in to their personal battles. Singer Tweet opening up about depression and actress Lisa Nicole Carson writing about living with bipolar disorder are just two of the few stories about Black people and mental health that make it to our eyes. Millions of American’s suffer from mental illness, but in our community there’s a hush hush policy on the disease. While the signs can be overt as emotional...

With the frequency and intensity of disasters increasing and more kids being affected by school shootings, increasing acts of terrorism, rising crime and the lingering aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we face a growing public health crisis caused by trauma that touches us all. For children, the world can be a terribly traumatic place. Aside from neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, community and school violence, war, medical issues, and other frightening events, natural disasters...

This was my thought when I saw the video about how we have it all wrong about addiction. There was a quote in the video that said "It's not the chemicals, it's the cage."

Because tax day is coming up, it’s a good time to consider the distribution of wealth in the United States. Let’s do so by thinking about the familiar game of Monopoly. Much like life itself, winning or losing Monopoly is the result of luck and skill. But there is a significant way in which Monopoly is not like real life. In Monopoly, each player starts with $1,500. In real life, individuals start with huge differences in wealth: money, property, investments and so forth. If Monopoly were...