Blog

Twitter has opened up a world of possibility to build a network of colleagues across sectors. After Parkland I became much more outspoken on social media about the issue of gun violence as a public health crisis. In my social media activism, I connected with a group of physicians who were also speaking out about gun violence prevention. I am honored to have been asked to write a blog from the perspective of a school nurse on the impact of gun violence in school for AFFIRM Research. Here is a...

The percentage of Americans who say that crime is an extremely or very serious problem in the U.S. dropped to under 50 percent in 2018, the first time respondents have been below that threshold since 2005, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. Forty-nine percent of those surveyed said that the problem of crime was extremely or very serious, a drop of 10 percent from last year and one of the sharpest decreases on record. The percentage of Americans who say crime is increasing...

On Tuesday, an amendment to the Florida constitution restored the voting rights of more than a million people with felony convictions. Amendment 4 needed sixty per cent to pass and won sixty-four, reflecting bipartisan support in a famously divided state. That leaves only two states, Iowa and Kentucky, that place lifelong voting bans on all citizens with felony convictions. Steve Phalen, who is thirty-six and works at an hvac distribution center in Florida, has not voted since he was a...

Newly elected governor Gavin Newsom’s big campaign promises on education could cost billions of dollars if fully realized. The governor-elect has pledged to establish a cradle-to-career system of education in California and made it a central tenet of his education platform. To improve educational outcomes, the former San Francisco mayor argues that the state needs to begin offering services in early childhood with interventions continuing throughout school and college. [For more on this...

For Kristen R. Ghodsee, it was the moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror between two stages of a job interview, bent under the hand dryer at an awkward angle that allowed her to pump breast milk frantically while drying leakage from her jacket. For Amy Westervelt, it was waddling to the mailbox to collect a check, two weeks after the birth of her child, while congratulating herself on "emailing from the recovery room" to make "a big deadline 48 hours after delivery.

Obamacare didn’t just give more people health insurance. It also caused more people to vote. That’s the conclusion of a new body of evidence that strongly suggests that giving people coverage through expansions of the Medicaid program increases their likelihood of participating in the next election. Medicaid expansions seem to raise both voter registration and voter participation, at least temporarily. On Tuesday, voters in three states approved measures to further expand Medicaid. The...

Most of us have had moments when we're feeling down—maybe we can't stop thinking about our worst mistakes, or our most embarrassing memories—but for some, these poor mood states can be relentless and even debilitating. Now, new research from UC San Francisco has identified a common pattern of brain activity that may be behind those feelings of low mood, particularly in people who have a tendency towards anxiety. The newly discovered network is a significant advance in research on the...

Update, November 8: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted part of the Trump administration’s motion for a temporary stay of the Juliana v. US lawsuit. Trial preparations are still going ahead, but the plaintiffs have 15 days to file a response. Read more about the background of the case and the stakes below. In a surprise decision late Friday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Juliana v. US , a major lawsuit filed by young people against the US government for failing to limit the...

When our beloved dog had cancer, we did all we could to help him be comfortable toward the end of his life. Because Rottweilers are so strong, they require a lot of pain medication, so we essentially had to give him what seemed like horse tranquilizers. While we were all caring for him, my daughters were in charge of giving him his daily meds. One day the girls were gone, and as I grabbed his handful of meds I thought, “When’s the last time I took my stuff?” So, I gathered all my vitamins,...

When Sabrina Bugget-Kellum walked into a neighbourhood clinic in New York for a routine appointment in in 2016, she was desperate. Her son was in prison. She was trying to look after his two young children, who were aged one and two. Their mother was emotionally unstable. Bugget-Kellum did not want the chaos of the adults’ lives passed down to another generation. “We didn’t know if they would be safe with their mother,” she recalled recently. “I began to pray, please God, I need some help.

The life expectancy for people living in Chinatown, New York: 93.6 years. Roosevelt Island, New York, which lies about 10 miles away: 59 years. Two people living in different parts of the same city could have very different life expectancy rates, according to data from the U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project. USLEEP released a comprehensive data set, the first-of-its-kind , tracking these rates at the neighborhood level. (The full data set is available here .) [For more on this...

I was excited to have ACEs Connection member, Anna Runkle, the Crappy Childhood Fairy, join me for a deep and powerful conversation about her Crappy Childhood Fairy mission, courses, philosophies, and more! You can find out more information by visiting https://crappychildhoodfairy.com/.