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In this graphic, each colored square represents a day in which at least one mass shooting took place in the United States.

Fifty-nine people are dead from the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history. As happened after Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a nightclub with a gun, or after Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans with a gun, or after Adam Lanza killed 26 children and teachers with a gun, or after James Holmes killed 12 moviegoers with a gun, the call for action from some policy makers has centered on one commonality between these events: All of the killers had brains. “Mental-health reform is the...

Jeremy Richman’s life, and his career as a neuroscientist, took a radical turn Dec. 14, 2012, when his daughter, Avielle, was one of 20 children who died in a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. He and his wife founded the Avielle Foundation, dedicated to funding research into how violence and compassion are fostered in the brain. Richman spoke Tuesday at St. John Fisher College. Below is an edited transcript of a telephone interview earlier that day. [For more on this story by Justin...

On the corner of Washington and Decatur streets in Montgomery, Alabama, a visitor can feel history pressing in from every side. Just down the street is the church where Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Two blocks away sits the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once lived. But although the city is crowded with historical markers—including, by one count, 59 Confederate memorials, and a similar number devoted to the civil-rights...

All children have incredible potential, most with parents, teachers and other adults in their lives who want the best for them. Unfortunately, many schools, particularly those that serve children with the greatest need, face obstacles that limit children's educational success -- rote curriculums, insufficient support for teachers and scant extracurricular options, to name a few. Educators, parents and policymakers have long acknowledged such obstacles, but we now know that there is another...

Investing in children’s health is a sound economic decision with a long-term impact on achieving sustainable human, social, and economic development. The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky’s Investing in Kentucky’s Future initiative was designed as a partnership with local community health coalitions to reduce the risk that today’s children will develop chronic diseases as they grow into adults. The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky is a statewide nonprofit organization working to address the...

How do children become delinquent? Well, there are many theories about that! In one of the most rigorous reviews of juvenile criminal justice records, the Adverse Childhood Experiences in the New Mexico Juvenile Justice Population study revealed that the frequency of early abuse, neglect and family chaos of incarcerated youth reaches staggering rates, skyrocketing above national averages. Join our Free WEBINAR next Friday (the 13th) where Robbyn Peters Bennett will discuss the research with...

When wealthy New Yorkers decided to build Central Park, they eliminated an egalitarian community known as Seneca Village. [See more of this story at https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/the-city-needed-them-out/541773/]

One common response to the national anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick is to disparage them as polarizing. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, summed up this particular critique in a tweet last weekend: Follow Joe Scarborough ✔ @JoeNBC This may be unpopular but it is a political reality: Every NFL player refusing to stand for the national anthem helps Trump politically. The idea here is that kneeling NFL players are committing an act of such blatant disrespect that they hand...

There’s a type of racism in the workplace many of us have personally witnessed, perpetrated or experienced: tokenism. Nowhere have I seen this play out more than in the nonprofit space. Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because...

Yesterday, a friend asked me if she could borrow my car to run a long-distance errand because my little car gets better mileage than her big one. I wanted to say no; switching cars on an already busy day felt like a hassle to me. But I didn’t say no. Instead, I hemmed and hawed and hesitated, hoping she’d get the hint. It can be really hard to say no. Despite my best attempts not to care what other people think of me , I still find myself wanting to be liked. I don’t want people to think I’m...

Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9 th -grade biology. An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families. “I go to school...