June 2018

Mike believed he had a good life and felt lucky for all the things he had. He was married to a loving wife, had a good job, owned a nice house and had three healthy kids. Despite all his good fortune, Mike could not shake the nagging feeling that he wasn’t enough: "I should be more successful. I should make more money. I should be where my boss is. I should have a graduate degree. I should have a bigger house. I should have more friends." These were some of the “shoulds” that plagued him...

Four months after he was released from prison, Steven Cave, 36, sat between the couple he calls his parents in Bloomsburg, Pa., and explained how their kindness showed him how to end a lifetime of chaos. “I never was big on words,” he said. That’s because Cave’s earliest memories are of his biological mother using words to mask a perverse pattern of abuse, sending him off with men and women she told him were uncles and aunts. [For more on this story by Micah Danney, go to...

For a thousand years, people have reported feeling better by meditating but there has never been a systematic study that quantified stress and how much stress changes as a direct result of meditation until now. U.S. Army Research Laboratory researchers spent a year collaborating with a team of scientists from the University of North Texas to develop a new data processing technique that uses heart rate variability as a sensor to monitor the state of the brain. Their findings are reported in a...

In late April, some residents of Normandale Lake Estates, an apartment complex in Bloomington, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, received a letter informing them that their leases were being terminated and they’d have to move out by June 1. New owners had recently bought the building and planned to upgrade the units. Existing tenants were told they could prequalify to return, but many suspect the new rents will be higher than they can afford. In the meantime, they’re scrambling to find...

My Star Trek-like existence has ended. I returned recently to my home base of Santa Fe after a fascinating year sabbatical in Seattle. I was introduced to a very wealthy and wired city where most residents truly believe that there’s an app for everything. Not only could one beam in food, clothes and uber-like transport, but personal trainers/home chefs, massage therapists/house cleaners, existential therapists, counselors with specialties in seasonal affective disorder and socially-engaged...

Technology and social media shape the identities and world views of today’s young people. Teen sexuality, relationships, and identity are interwoven with cell phones and social media, and many parents and professionals are left wondering: what does it all mean? That's why I'm hosting a live, interactive webinar on Teens, Technology and Relationships. We will start from the ground up, beginning with definitions and a roadmap of technology commonly used by adolescents. From there, we will...

Steven Cave’s transformation happened in spite of a system that calls itself correctional but instead, he says, perpetuated his worst traumas, beliefs and behaviors. He entered that system in the state that has sentenced the most minors to life without parole, and where solitary confinement was a favorite method of punishment. In 2013, the Department of Justice found the state’s use of it in several facilities was unconstitutional. Pennsylvania was the first state to institute the practice...

We Q&A with filmmaker Mary Beth Eversole on trauma, the inspirations for her new series, and the challenges of making an indie film. Mary Beth Eversole is the creator and executive producer of I: The Series, in pre-production. The short film series explores the damage of trauma—from ordinary events to major catastrophes—and its impact on individuals as they learn how to heal. Episode 1 takes us into the mind of MB, a traumatized person dealing with an eating disorder, body dysmorphia,...

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to dramatically improve student outcomes by increasing students' access to effective teaching. Participating sites adopted measures of teaching effectiveness (TE) that included both a teacher's contribution to growth in student achievement and his or her teaching practices assessed with a structured observation rubric. The TE measures were to be...

How could the United States do this? How could it separate 2,000 children from their parents, perhaps never to be reunited? How could it lose track of thousands more? How could it keep children in cages, in tents, in camps? This is a country that has assimilated wave after wave of immigrants and refugees, so that children might have a better life than their parents. This is the wealthiest civilization that the world has ever known, one with a bipartisan commitment to equality of opportunity...

On May 24, a multi-racial gaggle of Congress members wriggled for prime positioning around Donald Trump as he prepared to sign the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act into law. The bill considerably scales back the Dodd-Frank Act reforms passed in 2010 in response to the financial crash and was passed with the votes of 33 Democrats in the House and 17 in the Senate. It essentially frees small community banks and credit unions from many of the Dodd-Frank...

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate. A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be...