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He wasn’t even planning on submitting Resilience to the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, says James Redford, whose documentary  Paper Tigers has been screening to sold-out audiences around the U.S. this year. But late this summer, he shuffled some papers aside on his desk, and there was the application. It was due the next day. What the heck, he thought. I’ll submit it, as I have every other film I’ve made, but I won’t tell anyone. Why get people’s...

More people who are overweight or obese may get screened for diabetes under guidelines released Tuesday by a panel of prevention experts. As a result, insured people whose blood sugar is higher than normal now can be referred to nutrition and exercise counseling without paying anything out of pocket for it. "Obesity and overweight have been risk factors all along for diabetes," says Dr. Wanda Filer, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "But we haven't had guidelines that...

“And I soon gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet — and they often do in urban America — there is always the possibility of death.” —Brent Staples, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space,” a 1986 essay in Ms.

Michael Nash’s 30-year career as a jurist has mostly been focused on trying to make life better for Los Angeles County’s children. He is widely credited by lawyers, child advocates and other judges as having measurably improved the juvenile courts in Los Angeles, where he spent two decades serving alternately as the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court and supervising judge of the Juvenile Dependency Court — the latter oversees the fate of Los Angeles foster...

Every morning, the familiar routine plays out in hundreds of thousands of classrooms: A teacher looks out over the desks, taking note of who's in their seats and who isn't. On any given day, maybe there are one or two empty chairs. One here, one there. And that all goes into the school's daily attendance rate. But here's what that morning ritual doesn't show: That empty desk? It might be the same one that was empty last week or two weeks ago. The desk of a student who has racked up five, 10,...

Did you know that 90 percent of people who receive services from behavioral health organizations have experienced trauma? People with mental illnesses and addictions whose trauma goes unaddressed have greater mental health problems and increased risk of heart disease, suicide, and substance abuse. The National Council for Behavioral Health is currently accepting applications for the 2016-2017 Trauma-Informed Learning Community. This is an exciting opportunity for mental health and substance...

Only in America, as the song says—only in America are there enough mass shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments. Having instructed us that the first of this week’s mass shootings was free from any ideological taint at all—that the Planned Parenthood killings were the work of a lone nut, completely...

W hen I speak in my capacity as a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University or as an entrepreneur with a company worth $1.3bn, there is an assumption that I had a privileged background, one of affluence. In fact I grew up in poverty on public assistance with an alcoholic father and a mother impaired by a stroke who was chronically depressed and attempted suicide many times. My father was jailed repeatedly and we were evicted from our home on quite a few occasions. [For more of this...

It’s a debate that comes up over and over again, particularly right after tragic mass shootings like the one that took 14 lives Wednesday at a social services center in San Bernardino, California. Opponents of gun control argue that if the employees at Inland Regional Center had been armed, they could’ve protected themselves. Advocates say the key isn’t more firearms, but more gun control. So what does science say about whether gun ownership makes us safer? It says very...

The first time I heard a preschooler explaining a classmate’s disruptive behavior, I was surprised at how adult her 4-year-old voice sounded. Her classmate “doesn’t know how to sit still and listen,” she said to me, while I sat at the snack table with them. He couldn’t learn because he couldn’t follow directions, she explained, as if she had recently completed a behavioral assessment on him. Months before either of these children would start kindergarten,...

When a family has been divided by divorce, it creates added stress during the holidays with regard to visitation, gift giving and attending year-end school events. But it doesn't have to be that way. Divorced parents can set aside their differences; focus on communication, cooperation and compromise; and make the holidays less stressful on everyone. This was Ted and Linda's goal when they split up. "Since our separation happened just before Thanksgiving, Ted and I realized we needed to...

A s if it weren't enough to experience abuse, neglect, homelessness, hunger, or some combination of all of those things, many children face a world of adults who don't really understand how to help. Study after study documents the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on a person's health and brain development. Most recently, research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that the more ACEs people had, the higher their risk of suffering heart disease,...