Blog

Writing about climate change is often fraught, and hard to do beautifully. Because the ruling party refuses to acknowledge that the problem is real, writing on the subject often lapses into a didactic style of pose. At the same time, it can be easy to fall into a doom-saying pattern that focuses on scientific foreboding, technical but blunt language about our dire predicament. In this context, Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore is a revelation. The book is the...

Many parents have that experience when they are watching television news with their children, and something bad or inappropriate comes on, and they think, “Should my children be seeing this?” Sometimes it’s easier to say nothing and hope they missed what you just saw, but as I find out almost every time, kids don’t miss much. They may not understand it, but they saw it and they are thinking about it. It’s hard to know what children really understand. We watched the documentary film Bully...

I am prepping for an event at a Santa Fe foundation where my co-author and I will discuss chapter five of our book Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment. Of all our chapters, the one that made me the most nervous focused in reinventing child welfare. I was working with the New York City and Connecticut child welfare departments, setting up quality improvement programs, as we were finalizing this chapter. I was committed to candor but was afraid some...

I am thrilled to see that the National Childhood Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) has just released an excellent new fact sheet that discusses the importance of quality supervision that organizations can provide to staff members at risk for secondary traumatic stress (STS). This fact sheet identifies the core competencies for supervisors providing formal support to workers who are exposed to secondary trauma. It is intended to be a developmental assessment for supervisors, to help identify...

Virginia social worker Allison Jackson tells a story of being in a barber shop when a vocational counselor, clearly frustrated, ranted about the men in his program. They completed training, got hired, in good construction jobs, for example, only to be fired a short time later. “I’m so mad at these guys and they lose their jobs and I put them through all this hard skill training,” the counselor said in the story. Jackson leaned over and asked, “Have you heard about trauma resilience?” [For...

When he landed in Michigan in late May, all the weary little boy carried was a trash bag stuffed with dirty clothes from his dayslong trek across Mexico, and two small pieces of paper — one a stick-figure drawing of his family from Honduras, the other a sketch of his father, who had been arrested and led away after they arrived at the United States border in El Paso. An American government escort handed over the 5-year-old child, identified on his travel documents as José, to the American...

For the last 25 years I have either been a local official—a district attorney, mayor, and deputy mayor—or worked at Harvard Kennedy School with local officials. These officials tend to be pragmatists, looking for ways to build consensus and solve real day-to-day problems. Yet increasingly they find themselves thrust into battles with officials in other levels of government as polarization manifests itself into efforts from politicians to impose their views on as many others as possible.

Suicide rates have increased in nearly every state over the past two decades, and half of the states have seen suicide rates go up more than 30 percent. Suicide is a major public health issue, accounting for nearly 45,000 deaths in 2016 alone. That is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta decided to take a comprehensive look at suicides from 1999 to 2016. "Suicide in this country really is a problem that is impacted by so many factors. It's not just a mental health...

The government's energy regulator is facing allegations of cherry-picking data to approve pipeline projects that would disproportionately harm communities of color. According to academics, attorneys, and non-governmental organizations, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission used unreliable statistical methods in its analysis of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, masking its high cost to African-American and Native-American communities. While the Commission concluded that the pipeline...

Reports of Kate Spade’s suicide and struggle with depression have transformed her from symbol of polished prep to a blunt reminder that suffering affects all types. Her death has inspired hundreds to tweet some version of the same message: Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. But deep in the comment threads, some also debated a more uncomfortable question: What do you do when a friend is depressed for such a long time that you’ve started to feel that that nothing you can do will make...

One of the big questions in urbanism is the degree to which culture shapes economic development. Traditionally, it was thought that culture follows from economic development: The more developed and affluent that a city becomes, the more money that it has to spend creating art galleries, museums, concert halls, and other cultural venues. But my own writing on the creative class and a large number of other studies argue that culture acts as a key factor in economic development by helping...

Adolescence arrives with a surge of emotional energy. It can empower youth to expand their capabilities, make new friends, depend less on parents, and live more passionately. The influence of parents remains important in a child’s life, and is necessary to support teens in making good choices. Adolescence is also a time when some teens look to experience alcohol or drugs (such as heroine, cocaine, marijuana, and prescription medicine, among other substances). All too often, tragic results...