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NEW HAVEN — For five years, Nelson Pinos, my father, went to regular “check-ins” with immigration officials. Each time, the officials approved his requests to stay in this country. But last October, everything changed. “They want me to leave by November 30,” he told me. “They want me to show them a one-way plane ticket to Ecuador.” I couldn’t believe it. My father, who came here more than two decades ago and is undocumented, has no criminal record, has always paid his taxes and has three...

What Neuroscience and Emotion Theory Teach About Bullies- And what we can do to intervene.

In the light of the #MeToo movement, we're taking a look at abusive behavior in the workplace — not just sexual harassment, but incidents that involve bosses who are aggressive and bully their employees. Karlyn Borysenko, organizational psychologist and author of the book " Zen Your Work, " has studied stressful and toxic workplaces, as well as worked in one herself. She would find herself driving home from work, screaming and crying, only to realize how much her job was hurting her after...

For 25 years, the Emory University professor Vanessa Siddle Walker has studied and written about the segregated schooling of black children. In her latest book , The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools, Walker tells the little-known story of how black educators in the South—courageously and covertly—laid the groundwork for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and weathered its aftermath. The tale is told primarily through the life of...

Abstract Enthusiasm for trauma-informed practice has increased dramatically. Organizational interventions that train staff about trauma-informed practice are frequently used to promote trauma-informed systems change, but evidence about these interventions’ effects has not been integrated. A systematic review was conducted of studies that evaluated the effects of organizational interventions that included a “trauma-informed” staff training component. A search was conducted in July 2017 and...

A few months after I began injecting testosterone, I discovered that one of the startling new privileges of my male body was that I could silence an entire room just by opening my mouth. Despite the fact that my voice pitched baritone low, when I spoke, people didn’t just listen, they leaned in. They perched their heads in their hands and tilted toward me for a better angle. It was as if whatever I said, however banal, was surely worth that strain of a neck, or the hurried quieting of all...

Sometimes a wave of climate grief breaks over me. It happens unexpectedly, perhaps during a book talk, or while on the phone with a congressional representative. In a millisecond, without warning, I’ll feel my throat clench, my eyes sting, and my stomach drop as though the Earth below me is falling away. During these moments, I feel with excruciating clarity everything that we’re losing—but also connection and love for those things. Usually I don’t mind the grief. It’s clarifying. It makes...

For the past 28 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has published a “ State of the Climate ” report, an exhaustive accounting of the planet’s vital signs and weather-related trends for every region worldwide. But this year’s installment of the 310-page report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society with contributions from 524 scientists in 65 countries, feels a little different, according...

When I was a high school junior in New Orleans taking AP American history, my teacher assigned us a paperback book. Slim in contrast to our hulking required textbook, it was a funny, compelling, even shocking read. Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, explained how history textbooks got the story of America wrong, usually by soft-pedaling, oversimplifying and burying the thorny drama and uncertainties of the past under a blanket of dull, voice-of-God narration. The book also taught a...

SuperKid Power is all about building better kids. Kids that are self aware and self regulated. Kids that have learned self respect and mutual respect for their classmates, their teachers and their parents and siblings.

The story of an eight-year-old girl named Anna has sparked a movement to end childhood trauma in New Mexico. Anna is a fictional character based on a real case within the Protective Services Division of the New Mexico Children, Youth & Families Department and it's her story in the book, Anna, Age Eight, that is guiding urgent community work focused on ending ACEs, childhood trauma and maltreatment in New Mexico. A group of family-focused Dona Ana county agencies have initiated a...

Why do fictional television shows often do better than factual journalism at giving viewers a truer sense of the world in all its complexity? Here’s a big reason: TV script writers understand that viewers can deal with nuance and contradictions. Good TV, whether cable or broadcast, shows us fully rounded people grappling with challenges that viewers can identify with on some level, invented and over the top though they may be. They can be larger than life, like the mafia-don-in-therapy Tony...