February 2023

Survivor Stories with guest Michael Skinner - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIcufSmFCXo&t=33s A thought provoking discussion and insight on healing from trauma and sexual abuse. Presented by Ask A Sex Abuse Survivor - Amplifying survivor voices worldwide "I attended this event, and Michael has a gentle approach to making sexual and physical trauma stories become meaningful and a source of hope." - Jacek_Jack Haciak

Here’s a thought. Kids who experience parenting behaviors and practices generally recognized as supporting the healthy development of children often grow into kind, responsible, hardworking, ethical adults who don’t behave in ways that harm themselves and others. Over the years Congress created policies and laws that are detrimental to public health. Now we are faced with the monumental task of changing those policies and laws. If Congress had been made up of people who had experienced...

By McMaster University, Image: Aging Cell (2023), MedicalXpress, February 1, 2023 Exposure to a greater number of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) may accelerate biological aging in older adults, a McMaster University study has found. The research was published online in the journal Aging Cell . The study analyzed data from 1,445 participants aged 45 to 85 years from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. The participants provided blood samples for DNA methylation analysis and...

By Catherine Ho, Photo: Justin Sullivan, Staff/Getty Images, San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2023 Last week brought a relentless wave of horrific news events: two California mass shootings two days apart, the release of video footage showing Memphis police officers’ violent beating of Tyre Nichols, and the release of a body-cam recording showing an intruder’s attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in the couple’s San Francisco home. Each incident was disturbing, and in some...

By Isabel Wilkerson, Artwork: Lavett Ballard/TIME, Photography: Eric James Montgomery, TIME, February 2, 2023 How did our country arrive at this moment of rupture and fury? How is it that mass shootings, even of children in their classrooms, and police killings of unarmed citizens of color like Tyre Nichols have become a feature of our days? How is it that politicians are banning books in a country whose founding First Amendment protects the right to free speech? How is it that the U.S.,...

By Scott Neuman, Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images, National Public Radio (NPR), February 1, 2023 February marks Black History Month, a tradition that got its start in the Jim Crow era and was officially recognized in 1976 as part of the nation's bicentennial celebrations. It aims to honor the contributions that African Americans have made and to recognize their sacrifices. Here are three things to know about Black History Month: It was Negro History Week before it was Black History...

By Association for the Study of African American Life and History, February 2023 African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms, and police killings since our arrival upon these shores. These efforts have been to advocate for a dignified self-determined life in a just democratic society in the United States and beyond the United States political jurisdiction. The 1950s and 1970s in the United States...

By Jens Manuel Krogstad and Kiana Cox, Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images, Pew Research Center, January 20, 2023 Black History Month originated in 1926 as Negro History Week. Created by Carter G. Woodson, a Black historian and journalist, the week celebrated the achievements of Black Americans following their emancipation from slavery. Since 1928, the organization that Woodson founded, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, has selected an annual theme...

By Cassandra Lane, Image: Orion Pictures, Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2023 The murder of Tyre Nichols and the individual and collective reckoning we have all encountered — whether or not to witness the brutal images of his final moments — sent me back to an issue that I’ve been wrestling with for two decades. In the fall of 2001, I started writing the seeds of a book project with the intention of examining the multigenerational reverberations of my great-grandfather’s lynching. I started...

By Cathy Rogers, Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images, WagingNonviolence, January 31, 2023 Anyone who has come across “ Why Civil Resistance Works ” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan will be familiar with the idea that size matters for social movements. Their highly cited “3.5 percent rule” says that once movements actively involve at least 3.5 percent of the population they will inevitably succeed. The idea that this is a cast iron rule has been contested — including by Chenoweth — on the...

By Michael DePeau-Wilson, MedPageToday, February 1, 2023 Gray matter volume in key brain regions was lower in Black children compared with white children, likely due to disparities in childhood adversity, according to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ( ABCD ) study. Among children ages 9 to 10 years, white kids showed greater gray matter volumes compared with Black kids in the amygdala, hippocampus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, rostral anterior cingulate, pars...

By Charles M. Blow, Photo: Andrew Nelles, The New York Times, February 1, 2023 When RowVaughn Wells arrived at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church on an icy, gray Wednesday in Memphis, she was there to say goodbye to her son Tyre Nichols. He was dead. Killed. Beaten to death by local police officers while he screamed for her less than 100 yards from her house. There was a phalanx of television crews across the street from the front of the church, and the Secret Service manned the doors.