April 2017

The sight of a police officer interacting with a member of the public causes a significant if unknown number of Americans to reach for their cell phones and start recording, just in case. It isn’t that they believe all cops to be abusive or dishonest––just enough to warrant vigilance. “Take your phone out, take your phone out!” a Georgia resident told a companion as they watched Sergeant Michael Bongiovanni of Gwinnett County Police Department. He was standing by a sedan during a traffic...

Religious groups across the USA have long helped recovering addicts through 12-step programs and nonprofits that hire recovering addicts. But now, many are turning their sights on the opioid crisis gripping the nation, and experts say they can do more to fight the epidemic. Shining a spotlight on addiction educates congregants about the problem among family and friends and also helps reduce stigma, said Monty Burks, director of the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse...

This post is part of a CityLab series on o pen secrets —stories about what’s hiding in plain sight. An empty trestle bridge spans a grey river. White-washed doors lean on the side of a barn. Telephone poles and a tin shed frame a half-mowed ravine. Unseen in these otherwise mundane images of the American South: visual evidence for the acts of racial terror that once unfolded there. “It seems that many Americans, especially white Americans, either don't know much about lynchings or are...

Every day in this country students come to school without a way to pay for lunch. Right now it's up to the school to decide what happens next. Since new legislation out of New Mexico on so-called lunch shaming made headlines , we've heard a lot about how schools react. Some provide kids an alternative lunch, like a cold cheese sandwich. Other schools sometimes will provide hot lunch, but require students do chores, have their hand stamped or wear a wristband showing they're behind in...

It’s difficult to have a teenager’s mind. The brain develops rapidly during the adolescent years, which partially explains why teens experience anger, sadness and frustration so intensely. During these tumultuous years, hormones surge, bodies change and adolescents must face a number of social and academic challenges, such as managing their relationships, coping with peer rejection and,– especially this time of year — graduating from high school or preparing for college admission tests.

Jennifer and Peter Buffett and their NoVo Foundation, founded in 2006, have announced they have finished their study meant to help them understand how to spend $90 million in grants to local and regional groups taking on “the deep systemic, societal and institutional challenges” faced by girls and young women of color. NPQ’s Shafaq Hasan wrote about the start of this study period . To figure out what their priorities and approach should be, the foundation took the all-too-rare approach of...

In 2015, more Americans died from drug overdoses than from car accidents and gun homicides combined. That’s according to a startling interactive story published by The New York Times recently, which also noted that since 1990, drug-overdose deaths have increased by 500 percent. A new study suggests unemployment might be one of the factors behind that dramatic rise. The paper, published by NBER last week, finds that as the unemployment rate increases by one percentage point in a given county,...

Back for the second year, Beyond Paper Tigers conference will take place June 28th and 29th in Walla Walla, WA. Featuring Dr. Ken Ginsburg from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as the keynote speaker, BPT builds on the story of one community and how they've learned that embracing trauma-informed care and implementing ACEs science truly takes a village. Operationalizing the latest in brain science, BPT will provide concrete strategies for intervention with youth, families, and communities...

While the new movie "Get Out" is entertainment for some, it is a testament to a very real history for many...

Q: Your story in this week’s issue, “You Are Happy?,” is told through the eyes of a boy who watches his mother become an alcoholic. Why tell the story from his perspective rather than hers? A: There are several reasons. The most important is that, since the alcoholic mother is addled, I would have had to deal with her as an unreliable narrator. The lens of an unreliable narrator shifts the way that emotions are delivered, and I prefer my emotions to land like punches. Another is that having...

In a small conference room at Detroit Medical Center’s Sinai Grace Hospital , violence intervention specialist Ray Winans asks a roomful of young African Americans if they know anyone who has been killed by gunshots. They all raise their hands, including Winans and his partner, Calvin Evans. They’ve also lost friends, family members. “Five… six… seven,” says one, trying to remember. The young men are participants in the fledgling program D.L.I.V.E., pronounced D-Live—like “Live from New...

There are certain words — large, beautiful, buoyant words — weighed down by a heavy religious inheritance that make the nonreligious among us uneasy. Soul is one of them — a word whose secular redemption is more needed than ever . (Redemption, it occurs to me, is another — one which David Foster Wallace successfully secularized .) But hardly any word is more unnerving yet more urgently needed today than mercy — a word steeped in scripture yet almost biologically encoded into human nature; a...