Blog

State legislatures are an ever-changing landscape. Some states cram in a year of policy into short sessions, and the membership is constantly turning over. It can be a tough environment for child welfare issues to find traction, even with widespread concern over increases in foster youth and shortages in foster homes. One national organization is taking a crack at embedding more state houses with legislators poised to take the lead in this arena. The National Conference of State Legislatures...

Stephanie Keith, a photographer with Reuters, was recently invited by Lakota medicine man Ivan Lookinghorse to cover a 400-mile horse ride from Green Grass, South Dakota, to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, commemorating 150 years of the Fort Laramie peace treaty between the Sioux Nation and U.S. government. Keith said : “Under the treaty, the federal government recognized the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory as part of the Great Sioux Reservation and hostilities ended between the Sioux and white...

STOCKTON, Calif.—The philanthropists came on air-conditioned buses from big cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were driven past vacant lots overrun with weeds, auto-repair shops and fast-food restaurants and meat markets, and deposited at a construction site that had once held a liquor store that police had long tried to shut down because it was dominated by drug dealers. And there, they were asked for money: money to pair single mothers with case managers, money to provide...

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history, and extraordinary any way you slice it. Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire . He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times over. He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, 50 times as much as Oprah, and perhaps...

At the height of summer, naps at the beach can be alluring, and many of us may find ourselves tempted to take prolonged vacations from exercise. But two new, admonitory studies involving both older and younger adults who temporarily cut back on their physical activity indicate that the metabolic consequences of not moving much for a few weeks can be pervasive and persistent, lingering to some extent even after people start moving around normally again. Physical activity is, of course, good...

Prison employees experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a rate that is similar to Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and higher than police officers, according to a study by researchers at Washington State University and the University of Alabama-Birmingham that was recently published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. The researchers sent surveys to each of the approximately 2,000 members of the union representing WA state prison workers. A total of 355 Washington State...

Research has often cited urbanicity, or dwelling in an urban setting, as a risk factor for developing the symptoms associated with psychosis. A new study, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, examines the impact of urbanicity, adverse neighborhood conditions, and violent crime victimization on developing psychotic experiences in adolescence. The authors, led by Joanne Newbury of King’s College London, determined that adolescents raised in urban vs. rural areas were significantly more likely...

My wish for all who have experienced ACEs and trauma beyond childhood is hope, healing, joy and tranquility. We all deserve nothing less.

It appears we are experiencing a bit of an economic reckoning in this country. Historic wealth inequality has prompted a wide variety of experts to put some big ideas on the table. Do we need a federal minimum wage, or should we expand the earned-income tax credit? Even more extreme, but gaining traction on both sides of the aisle, do we need a universal basic income? Or is the solution, as many conservatives would argue, less government intervention, not more? While Democrats and...

It’s a summer ritual in many American cities — declaring a juvenile curfew to keep troublemaking teenagers off the streets. This summer at least one city—Austin—has decided not to sound the alarm. The Austin Police Department’s assistant chief, Troy Gay, told The Marshall Project, “We looked at the evidence and decided it was time to discard the curfew law; it wasn't making an impact on juvenile victimization.” The evidence was a report drafted by a consortium of community groups that banded...

The poolside confrontations keep coming. This summer, a black boy was harassed by a white woman in South Carolina; a black woman was asked to provide identification by a white man in North Carolina; and a black man wearing socks in the water had the police called on him by a white manager of an apartment complex in Tennessee. The encounters, some captured on video, have prompted widespread anger and resulted in consequences for white people involved. But they are hardly new: The United...

"W hat are friends for?” This isn’t a rhetorical question. Friendship is one of life’s most important features, and one too often taken for granted. The human desire for companionship may feel boundless, but research suggests that our social capital is finite—we can handle only so many relationships at one time. Social scientists have used a number of ingenious approaches to gauge the size of people’s social networks; these have returned estimates ranging from about 250 to about 5,500...