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In september 2015, the body of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian migrant, washed up on a Turkish beach. The boy had fallen off a rubber raft provided by a smuggler who had promised the boy’s father a motorboat. As the startling images of the drowned boy spread, they prompted an outpouring of humanitarian aid—including from the tech sector, which wanted to help prevent the next Aylan from drowning. Knowing that many refugees have access to cellphones, volunteers around the world began...

On a crisp morning in the struggling Bay Area city of Richmond, Calif., Doria Robinson prepares a community vegetable garden for an onslaught of teenagers who will arrive that afternoon. Beyond the farm, a Chevron refinery pumps plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. The farm won’t remove the pollution, but Robinson believes it can make the city’s residents healthier in other ways, specifically by showing them that “their actions have an impact.” “Down here it’s hard to see what matters,”...

Nearly half a century ago, Richard Nixon called for an "all-out offensive" on drug abuse. It was the opening salvo in America's longest running war. Successive presidents took up the call to arms. Arrest rates soared and mandatory minimum sentences sent young men - particularly black men - away for long stretches for low-level offences. Then as violent crime rates fell under George W Bush and prisons became clogged, prosecutions eased. The war on drugs fell out of fashion. Barack Obama...

In many cities, affordable housing has a problem: it’s not affordable. California Governor Jerry Brown made that point again, emphatically, with his new state budget. He’s said that won’t put any new state resources into subsidizing affordable housing until state and local governments figure out ways to bring the costs down. Last year, opposition from labor and environmental groups blocked the governor’s proposal to exempt affordable housing from some key regulatory requirements. Brown had...

As a teacher and teacher-educator for more than a decade, I have had the privilege of working with thousands of educators. Now, in my current capacity as the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence , part of my job is supporting educators from all over the nation in learning, living, and teaching social and emotional learning (SEL), a set of life skills that support people in experiencing, managing, and expressing their emotions effectively and in fostering...

This post contains some spoilers for the first season of Big Little Lies. HBO’s recently wrapped miniseries Big Little Lies is a whodunit featuring attractive people grimly swirling wine and glaring at roiling surf from deck parapets. The adjective “soapy” frequently worms its way into reviews that unfairly boil the show down to its least compelling elements. The Wireit is not, but Big Little Lies isn’t unserious just because it portrays denizens of a tax bracket few viewers can sniff. [For...

This post is part of a CityLab series on o pen secrets —stories about what’s hiding in plain sight. Despite recent progress, South Carolina still has a domestic violence problem. [See the whole post here: https://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/04/no-one-really-wants-to-talk-about-it/523554/]

Who should you partner with to create lasting change through resilience in your community? The Building Community Resilience (BCR) initiative aims to address, prevent, and reduce the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adverse community environments (ACEs) on children’s health and wellbeing ( The “Pair of ACEs” ). An essential element of the successes of BCR’s five test sites around the country has been strategic collaborations. In your work to build resilience, identifying...

Here's yet another reason to make sure your kids are active: New research shows those with stronger muscles may have better working memory. Evaluating 79 children between the ages of 9 and 11, scientists said they found that muscle fitness was directly related to a more accurate memory. The results also reinforced established research linking kids' aerobic fitness to better thinking skills and academic performance. "There are multiple ways children can derive benefit from exercise ... to...

Teens and young adults who come from troubled backgrounds have a greater risk of killing themselves, a new study suggests. Kids exposed to suicide in the family, parental mental health disorders and substantial parental criminal behavior had the highest suicide rates, the study found. The findings "emphasize the importance of understanding the social mechanisms of suicide and the need for effective interventions early in life aimed at alleviating the suicide risk in disadvantaged children,"...

You probably haven’t heard of the winner of this year’s UNESCO Peace Prize. In the past, the award, officially called the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Prize, has been granted to internationally renowned figures including Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres. This year, for the first time ever, the award goes to a mayor: 56-year-old Giusi Nicolini, mayor of a small Italian island that’s home to about 6,000 people. The island in question is Lampedusa , a small islet roughly equidistant...

You saw the pictures in science class—a profile view of the human brain, sectioned by function. The piece at the very front, right behind where a forehead would be if the brain were actually in someone’s head, is the pre-frontal cortex. It handles problem-solving, goal-setting, and task execution. And it works with the limbic system, which is connected and sits closer to the center of the brain. The limbic system processes emotions and triggers emotional responses, in part because of its...