Blog

In December 2015, I wrote a story about the potential uses of the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. That piece, based on a conference that I attended in Washington, D.C., quoted six men and one woman. The six men included five scientists and one historian, all quoted for their professional expertise. The one woman was a communications director at a tissue bank organization, and her quote was about her experience as the mother of a child with a genetic disease. These disparities, both...

A new research study on communicating about opioids in Appalachia has published shocking results: stigma is the driving force that keeps people who use drugs from seeking help. I’m kidding. Anyone who has worked with people who use drugs already knows that stigma plays a pivotal role in why drug use can flourish under the radar, why so many people have difficulty seeking help, and why communities and policy makers often kick the can over to law enforcement instead of investing in...

I still remember the time I hit one of my close friends. It happened many years ago. We were exiting a chemistry class together, and he was teasing me…mercilessly. I repeatedly asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Rather than shrugging it off, though, I hit him hard on the arm. Both of us were shocked, but only I was left feeling shame, too. I know I’m not the only one who has let anger get the best of them only to regret it afterwards. While anger can sometimes be useful , more often than...

Minority youth are more likely to become incarcerated than white youth. This fact is so prevalent that even people outside the juvenile justice field are familiar with the term school-to-prison pipeline . In an era when there’s an overall decline in the incarceration of youth, we are also seeing problematic practices regarding school discipline. The use of in- and out-of-school suspensions has nearly doubled since 1970 even though we know that suspensions serve to disrupt education and are...

In the United States today, African Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard University-trained lawyer, works every day to right this wrong . He has argued five cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court ; won reversal, release, or relief for 115 wrongly committed death row inmates; and also won a Supreme Court case affirming it unconstitutional to deliver life-without-parole sentences to children 17 and under. I met Stevenson on an August...

(ACEs-related articles by category.) ACEs, Adversity's Impact What do asthma, heart disease and cancer have in common? Maybe childhood trauma Racism linked to uptake of smoking in young people Confronting adverse childhood experiences to improve rural kids' lifelong health Does stress cause dementia? Does America have a caste system? Childhood adversity, telomeres and love: Crappy childhood fairy interviews Susana De Leon, MD [20 min - Crappy Childhood Fairy] Who's still smoking? ACS report...

Hi All, wanted to let you know about the summit, which is free this week. Speakers from USA, Canada, Australia, UK and Iceland! Psychologists, Lawyers, Change-Makers, Founders of Movements, Coaches, Parents and Athletes. We want to unite our community by shining a spotlight on the shift that needs to take place in sports from bullying and abuse to mindfulness and empathy. Please join us! We're on the second day, but on the weekend, all interviews will be available for free. Thanks for all...

Since January 25, after sunset, the shades on a window-walled gallery in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village have rolled up, and the sidewalk outside has been cast in a cool, blue glow. The color comes from a four-and-a-half-hour-long video of ice cores. Inside the gallery, scanned images of samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet are on a continuous loop, representing 110,000 years of accumulation. Watching the footage gives the impression of descending through the ice core and into the past. The...

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.—This community was still reeling from the recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news. Amazon, the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000 people here.“This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris told a local newspaper at the time. In the months and years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its...

National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP) Partners for Vulnerable Youth is hoping to educate healthcare providers on the warning signs for human trafficking of children in a series of three continuing education courses. "Human Trafficking 101" is the first course , which will attempt to educate providers not only about signs that a child may be a victim of human trafficking, but also to recognize situations that make children particularly vulnerable to human trafficking...

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," wrote Edward Abbey, the famously misanthropic environmental activist, in 1968. To call Abbey—who celebrated eco-sabotage and advocated banning cars in National Parks—a pessimist would be understating the matter. Today, though, his words seem prescient. Twentieth-century economics was built on the mantra that growth is good—and more growth is even better. The famous Kuznets curve , which appeared in 1955, purported to show...

Welfare reform is back. President Trump signaled its return to the forefront of national policy debates in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, when he announced a plan to “lift our citizens from welfare to work.” He shouldn’t have trouble finding support for it: With a collective of pro-reform officials leading key agencies, and with longtime entitlement crusader Paul Ryan as speaker of the House, the GOP in 2018 will have its best chance in a generation to make major changes to the...