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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reports that 64,747 licensed gun dealers (defined here as gun shops, pawnbrokers, or individual sellers) existed in the U.S. as of December 2015. But that raw number alone might not mean much to you. So a new mapping project by data viz company 1point21 Interactive tries to contextualize this number by comparing it to something all Americans know exists in abundance: Starbucks. ”Looking at the Federal Firearms License data, the...

The office responsible for providing free legal services to defendants in New Orleans who can’t afford lawyers will start turning clients away this week. The city’s public defender’s office warned last fall that this day was coming. And it came on January 12, when the office announced that it would have to stop taking on indigent clients charged with serious felonies, particularly those facing life sentences. The office no longer has enough staff or resources to handle the...

There is perhaps no other issue in health care that elicits an emotional reaction on par with the question of how we die. The discussions around “end-of-life care” and “advanced care planning” (ACP) typically concern the treatment we will receive (or forgo) at end of our lives, and often they identify a surrogate decision-maker: someone whom the patient trusts to make sensible decisions on their behalf when they are no longer capable of doing so themselves. Before...

Ask artist Gemma Correll, and she'll tell you living with anxiety is like living in a real-life horror movie. Actually, don't ask her — simply click on her recent comic book-style illustrations  and you'll see an anxiety attack can begin when someone decides to call you instead of text. The illustrations are based on Correll's own "anxieties and neuroticisms," she told  Mashable ; she herself has been diagnosed with clinical anxiety and...

Erik Soderstrom photo ________________________________________ Susan Mercer was there to help “soften” the process of death. For the last few months, Mercer had been getting to know her client and their family through Hospice of San Luis Obispo County’s in-home respite care program, which provides volunteer-based support to people and their families and a few hours of relief to the primary care provider. As death got closer for her client, Mercer’s role gradually...

A little less than two years ago, a group of ACEs activists from Memphis came to a meeting of the Philadelphia ACEs Task Force and made a site visit to the 11th Street Family Health Services for “information and enlightenment,” according to Chris Peck, a member of the six-person delegation. Since then, these and other leaders in Tennessee are poised to take what they have started in Memphis statewide, demonstrating that ACEs research has the power to galvanize communities and...

Almost a decade ago, I wrote an email to the director of the Alaska Division of Family and Youth Services to introduce them to the concept of Lean Government. I got no response. I spoke to our Alaska GOvernor and his Chief of Staff about the promise of Lean Government for improving the quality of our children and social services, and got just the political response. Our Governor committed to a second meeting to talk about ACE’s. I am currently working to get a meeting with the Governor...

Transcendental meditation may help ease post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in some soldiers and seems to reduce their need for medication, a new study finds. "Regular practice of transcendental meditation provides a habit of calming down and healing the brain," study lead author Vernon Barnes, a physiologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in a college news release. The study included 74 active-duty U.S. military personnel with PTSD or...

B efore solitary confinement became a widely acknowledged national problem—before the hunger strikes and class-action lawsuits , before the Senate hearings , before a Supreme Court justice’s condemnation of the “human toll wrought by extended terms of isolation,” before corrections leaders described holding more than 80,000 prisoners alone in a cell for 23 hours a day as a “grave problem”—Catherine Bauman did something a bit less dramatic. She...

An increasing number of college students are seeking help for mental health issues, at a rate outpacing the growth in enrollment by five-fold, a new report shows. Data collected at 139 college and university counseling centers, from 2009-2010 through 2014-2015, reflects "slow but consistent" growth in students reporting depression, anxiety and social anxiety. And 20 percent of students seeking mental health treatment, the report found, are taking up about half of all campus counseling...

To handle stress and adversity more effectively, we should probably pay closer attention to what is happening inside our bodies, according to a fascinating new brain study of resilience and why some people seem to have more of it than others. We live in difficult times, as readers of this newspaper know well. Worries about the state of our world, our safety, our finances, health and more can lead to a variety of physiological and psychological responses. [For more of this story, written by...

Raise your hand if you've ever said "I'm sorry" when you weren't actually sorry. *raises hand* It's kind of a common thing. It's so common, in fact, that someone developed a plugin for Gmail called Just Not Sorry that actually catches and underlines the word sorry in your emails. "I'm sorry to bother you, but..." Does that sound familiar? It is for a lot of people in the workplace, especially women. It's not just a work thing or a woman thing, though. Lots of people say they're sorry when...