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A new film details the reason the star postponed her recent tour—and will test cultural attitudes about gender, pain, and pop. “Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust,” the author Leslie Jamison wrote in 2014. “We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.” Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” unpacked the suffering-woman archetype, which encompasses literature’s broken hearts (Anna Karenina, Miss Havisham) and society’s sad girls—the depressed, the anorexic, and in the...

Business boosters believe connectivity is the key to spurring new businesses. But can that model work in chronically disinvested communities? Vewiser Dixon leans forward behind his wide wooden desk and waxes on about his neighborhood. Dixon has lived in this corner of Kansas City his whole life; it was once and perhaps remains the beating heart of African-American life here—18th and Vine, made famous by Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and that set. Dixon now owns property along the rough-strewn...

In her new book, the law professor Mehrsa Baradaran argues that economic self-sufficiency can only go so far without government backing. For generations, many black activists have looked at America’s financial system and said, thanks, but no thanks. As an alternative, they’ve promoted self-sufficiency—the creation of black wealth through black-owned banking and entrepreneurship, and patronage of black businesses. This idea resurfaces again and again, as it did recently in the #BankBlack...

DENVER — Every time Jacque Pearson tried to devise a plan to move her 81-year-old dad, who has Alzheimer’s, from his home in Boise, Idaho, to hers in Denver, she felt stuck. Then, two weeks ago, she had a breakthrough. It happened at an AARP-sponsored session in which Pearson created a “CareMap” — a hand-drawn picture showing all the people she cares for as well as the people surrounding those individuals and her own sources of support. On one side of the paper, Pearson sketched out her...

A Pew report shows that nearly a third of white Americans under the age of 30 have “cold” feelings for the police. Recent court rulings and decisions made by the Trump administration this year might help explain why. Less than a year into the post-Obama milieu, yet another major police shooting trial—the Jason Stockley case in St. Louis —produced a widely denounced verdict that reminds us how difficult it is to hold police officers accountable when they murder African Americans. Then-St.

Early last year, two suicidal patients showed up at a hospital emergency room in Pierre, S.D., seeking help. Although the incidents happened weeks apart, both patients ended up in an unexpected place: jail. Across the country, and especially in rural areas, people in the middle of a mental health crisis are locked in a cell when a hospital bed or transportation to a hospital isn’t immediately available. The patients are transported from the ER like inmates, handcuffed in the back of police...

Inequality in the United States has become a household concept, if for no other reason than Sen. Bernie Sanders centering his presidential run around fixing it. There’s plenty of visible evidence of it, but author Chuck Collins wants Americans to take a closer look at other aspects of inequality too, particularly wealth disparity, the power imbalance it creates, and how the rules of the economy have been changed to benefit those asset owners at the expense of everybody else. Collins is a...

There exists a seemingly infinite stream of self-help articles that advise parents on how to raise kids with grit—children who persevere in the face of challenges. The offered wisdom ranges from the generically obvious (Praise the process! Use positive words!) to the bizarrely specific (Create an obstacle course!). But perhaps the simplest way of instilling persistence in your kids is to persist yourself—and let them see you doing it. According to a new study by Julia Leonard , Yuna Lee, and...

Davis, CA Mayor (and ACN member), Robb Davis writes about attending a recent trauma-informed law enforcement forum. I participated in a fascinating forum about “trauma-informed law enforcement” and before it began I wondered whose trauma we would be discussing: victims of crime, police, or other community members? It turns out the conversation was about all three, and I left wondering if trauma-based analysis might, perhaps, point to a way out of the mutual fear, and the attendant hostility...

Review: The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others. By Tali Sharot. Henry Holt. 231 pages. 978-1627792653 Facts alone don’t change people’s minds or behavior. Emotions do. That’s the basic takeaway from cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s highly accessible exploration of why and how we succeed, or fail, in our quest to influence, persuade, or alter the opinions and actions of others. Understand how the brain works, she argues in The Influential Mind:...

I t’s the age old question (pun intended), and one that has given rise to an anti-ageing industry that is estimated to grow to $216.52 billion by 2021: how can we, mere mortals that we are, live longer? According to recent studies, the answer could well lie in Japan. The Japanese top the global table for life expectancy: on average, they can expect to live for 83.7 years (the UK comes 20th, with an average of 81.2 years). And this week, they hit another milestone, as it was revealed that the...

Yosimar Reyes, a poet and artist, reflects on the guidance the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas has given him. Well before Jose Antonio Vargas became a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and filmmaker, he was told he couldn’t get an internship at The Seattle Times because he was an undocumented immigrant. At the time he feared that his immigration status would threaten both his ability to build a career in journalism as well as his ability to stay in the United States.