July 2021

By Soo Youn, The Washington Post, June 29, 2021 Meg Trowbridge’s plans for the week are pretty simple. She’ll take long, meandering walks and explore some new parks and visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the first time since 2019 — all on company time. “I’m so excited to take a morning or afternoon walk when I’m not in the crowd of after-work people,” said Trowbridge, a copywriter for Mozilla, which produces the Firefox Web browser. “I’m definitely going to hit SF MOMA and just...

By Sarah McCammon, National Public Radio, July 4, 2021 SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST: Bestselling author Michael Pollan has made a career of asking big questions about the natural world and our relationship to it. In his latest book, he's turning his attention to three psychoactive plants - opium, caffeine and mescaline. The book is called "This Is Your Mind On Plants." In it, Pollan experiments with each mind altering substance and writes about what their classifications as drugs - legal or not -...

By Marina Koren, The Atlantic, July 1, 2021 In the beginning, the small group of Americans who aspired to become astronauts had to pass an isolation test. Spaceflight wasn’t going to be easy, and the country wanted people with tough minds. For his test, John Glenn sat at a desk in a dark, soundproofed room. He found some paper in the darkness, pulled a pencil out of his pocket, and spent the test writing some poems in silence. He walked out three hours later. For her test, Wally Funk floated...

By Alison Escalante, Forbes, August 11, 2020 What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all? In a compelling new paper , biological anthropologists call on the scientific community to rethink mental illness. With a thorough review of the evidence, they show good reasons to think of depression or PTSD as responses to adversity rather than chemical imbalances. And ADHD could be a way of functioning that evolved in an ancestral...

By Malik Pickett, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, June 27, 2021 Glen Mills, Wordsworth, Devereaux, and most recently the Delaware County Juvenile Justice Center are all highly publicized scandals involving the abuse of children inside Pennsylvania juvenile facilities. Abuses such as these precipitated Gov. Tom Wolf’s creation of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force which studied the Commonwealth’s juvenile justice system for 16 months to create recommendations for reform. Last week, the...

I no longer celebrate holidays, as doing so would be illogical to have the most safety and hopeful possibilities for myself and who I am attached to - and would equally betray the connection I have to other life, impacting every child and innocent having the most safety and hopeful possibilities.

By Dana Thomson and Susan Balding, Child Trends, June 22, 2021 Public debate on the root causes of child poverty has often focused on individual—usually parental—behavior. This means that safety net policies have often concentrated on encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors among parents and caregivers, usually through program eligibility requirements like minimum work hours or citizenship, rather than focusing on societal obstacles to alleviating poverty. The American Rescue Plan...

By Cecily Sailer, Resolve Magazine, June 2, 2021 On a chilly spring morning in Philadelphia, Michelle Simmons unlocks the door to the building she owns on Chelten Avenue, not far from her old middle school. She owns three buildings in Germantown, actually. More accurately, her nonprofit owns them. But Simmons and her organization, Why Not Prosper , are basically synonymous. Once inside the building, she moves quickly, flipping light switches, sorting paperwork, stuffing goodie bags, talking...

By Martha Bebinger, National Public Radio, June 23, 2021 One evening in late March, a mom called 911. Her daughter, she said, was threatening to kill herself. EMTs arrived at the home north of Boston, helped calm the 13-year-old, and took her to an emergency room. Melinda, like a growing number of children during the pandemic, had become increasingly anxious and depressed as she spent more time away from in-person contact at school, church and her singing lessons. NPR has agreed to use only...

Trauma Informed Care Practioners, Dr. Warren Larkin of the United Kingdom and Becky Haas of the United States are teaming up to host a second global conversation on the implementation of ACEs science on August 16 from 12-1:30 p.m. (EDT). Session two will feature Mathew Portell, Principal of Fall Hamilton Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee. Mathew Portell has dedicated a decade and a half to education in his role as a teacher, instructional coach, teacher mentor, and school...

By Emma Ockerman, Vice, June 23, 2021 After a Florida teacher mistook a third grader’s drawing of a person hugging a rocket for male genitalia, police seized the child for an involuntary psychiatric examination and threw her into the back of a squad car, according to a new federal lawsuit. A group of parents and advocates filed the complaint against the School Board of Palm Beach County and local officials Tuesday. What happened to the third-grader, who was 8 years old at the time of the...

By Anne Brice, Greater Good Magazine, June 18, 2021 Emiliana Simon-Thomas is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center, where she co-teaches The Science of Happiness , a free, eight-week online course that “explores the roots of a happy, meaningful life.” She earned her Ph.D. in psychology from UC Berkeley in 2004, studying how emotional and cognitive processes interact to shape behavior and brain activity. In the interview below, Simon-Thomas talks about how humans are a...