By Sandee LaMotte, CNN, September 12, 2022 Put on your walking shoes and don’t forget your step counter: You can reduce your risk for cancer, heart disease and early death by getting up to 10,000 steps a day, but any amount of walking helps, according to a new study. Health benefits rose with every step, the study found, but peaked at 10,000 steps – after that the effects faded. Counting steps may be especially important for people who do unstructured, unplanned physical activity such as...

By Saundra Amrhein, Photo: Courtesy/Gulf Coast Community Foundation, Herald-Tribune, September 2, 2022 Rebecca Gannon looked into the blank stares of the homeless women she was trying to help. Even as the women sat quietly with fidgeting infants, Gannon sensed they couldn’t hear her, their emotions roiling inside. “It almost seems like they can’t understand the situation that I’m sharing,” Gannon said. Housing Crisis: New Sarasota-Manatee housing collaborative may offer immediate help to...

By David Molloy, Photo: Getty Images, BBC News, September 12, 2022 Modern slavery is a growing challenge thanks to a mix of armed conflict, climate change and the global pandemic, a new UN report says. International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates suggest that 50 million people - or one out of every 150 people alive - are trapped in forced labour or forced marriages. That is up nearly 10 million on its numbers from five years ago. The ILO said the fact things were getting worse was...

By Anemona Hartocollis, Photo: Vanessa Leroy for The New York Times, The New York Times, September 12, 2022 A woman who lived in the shadows of Harvard discovers, at 80, that her enslaved ancestors had links to the university. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — On a cloudy day this summer, Roberta Wolff-Platt paid a visit to Christ Church, a short walk from Harvard Yard. Standing at the edge of a crypt in the church basement, she marveled that her ancestor Darby Vassall, born enslaved, had been buried here,...

By Katherine Dillinger and Deidre McPhillips, CNN, September 12, 2022 People who got intravenous ketamine at three private ketamine infusion clinics had “significant improvement” in symptoms of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation, a new study says. The study, published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry , adds to a growing body of research showing ketamine’s promise in treating these conditions. It “gives some more real-world data, which is incredibly important” because it...

By Jason DeParle, Photo: Maddie McGarvey, The New York Times, September 11, 2022 With little public notice and accelerating speed, child poverty fell by 59 percent from 1993 to 2019, according to a comprehensive new analysis that shows the critical role of increased government aid. WASHINGTON — For a generation or more, America’s high levels of child poverty set it apart from other rich nations, leaving millions of young people lacking support as basic as food and shelter amid mounting...

By Paula Span, Photo: Natosha Via for The New York Times, The New York Times, September 4, 2022 Many employees reduce their hours or stop working to help ailing family members. But it may be years before they fully return to the work force, studies indicate. At first, Dana Guthrie thought she could help care for her parents, whose health had begun to decline, and still hold onto her job administering a busy dental practice in Plant City, Fla. “It was a great-paying job and I didn’t want to...

By A. Andrews, Illustration: A. Andrews , The Washington Post, September 11, 2022 I’ve been thinking a lot about bootstrap culture: that American ideal that anyone should be able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and succeed at anything. There’s a toxic root to the notion that we should all ascribe ourselves to impossible tasks. All of this affects life in a disabled body – a body that is constantly observed and assigned both too much expectation and little whatsoever. The mixed...

By Knvul Sheikh, Photo: Victor Moriyama for The New York Times, The New York Times, September 7, 2022 Recent research suggests that people who work out have stronger resistance to infectious diseases — including Covid — but experts say the findings need to be tested further. You’ve probably heard the advice: One of the best things you can do to keep healthy — especially as cold and flu season creeps up — is stay physically active. This folk wisdom has been around for ages, but until...

By Joan E Greve, Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters, The Guardian, September 11, 2022 Long championed by climate activists, the green bank would provide funding to expand clean energy use across the US. Buried on page 667 of the Inflation Reduction Act is a climate policy that has been in the making for more than a decade. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund provides $27bn in funding for projects aimed at lowering America’s planet-heating emissions. Some of those funds, roughly $7bn, will be...

By Andrew Hertz, MD, and Keili Mistovich, MD, MPH , Medpage Today, September 8, 2022 The direct care subscription delivery model is rapidly growing. Hint Health, a national leader in the direct care space, identified an increase of patients receiving direct primary care by 241% and an increase of direct primary care clinicians by 159% over the past 4 years. Direct care (DC) reestablishes the primary relationship between doctors and patients without the involvement of insurance. Care is...

By Joel Warsh , Photo: Washington Post staff illustration/Getty Images/iStockphoto, The Washington Post , September 7, 2022 Joel Warsh is a pediatrician in Los Angeles specializing in integrative medicine. What decade are we in? A school district in southwestern Missouri has decided to bring back corporal punishment — otherwise known as spanking, in this case with paddles — as a way to discipline students. Parents in Cassville, Mo., learned recently that spanking would once again be allowed...

By Jakob McWhinney , Photo: Brittany Cruz-Fejeran for Voice of San Diego, Voice of San Diego , September 6, 2022 Godwin Higa is a longtime educator and principal celebrated for his spearheading of trauma-informed schools and restorative justice. But can his decades of experience make up for a lack of polish, institutional support and funding? Godwin Higa’s outreach strategy for the primary election for the sub-district B seat on the San Diego Unified School District board – which represents...

By David Robson, BBC, September 6, 2022 Our brain changes hugely during adolescence. New research shows how we can use this transformation to help teens achieve their potential. Parents and teachers of teens may recognise that sensation of dealing with a highly combustible mind. The teenage years can feel like a shocking transformation – a turning inside out of the mind and soul that renders the person unrecognisable from the child they once were. There's the hard-to-control mood swings,...

By Aina J Khan, Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images, The Guardian, July 12, 2022 A collection of almost 30,000 rarely seen images of the black diaspora in the UK and the US, dating from the 19th century to the present, has been launched as part of an educational initiative to raise awareness of the history of black people in the UK. The Black History & Culture Collection includes more than 20 categories of images including politics, hair, education, female empowerment and...

By Joshua Yaffa, Illustration: Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker, The New Yorker, July 14, 2022 In the middle of March, a psychologist named Spartak Subbota was contacted by a group assisting Ukrainian refugees who had recently arrived in Poland. Among them was a young woman in her mid-twenties who had managed to flee a village outside of Chernhiv, in Ukraine’s north, near the border with Belarus—could he speak with her? Russian forces had entered the woman’s village in the early days of the...

By Arne Duncan, Image: Chicago CRED, Stanford Social Innovation Review, July 14, 2022 The City of Chicago is the undisputed gun violence capital of America. Last year, the city saw nearly as many shootings and killings as New York and Los Angeles combined, despite having barely a fifth of their combined population. While several other cities have higher per-capita murder rates , the sheer number of shootings in Chicago—more than 4,400 in 2021, including 800 homicides—places my hometown at...

By Emily Badger and Eve Washington, Map: Up for Growth analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data., The New York Times, July 14, 2022 San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Washington have long failed to build enough housing to keep up with everyone trying to live there. And for nearly as long, other parts of the country have mostly been able to shrug off the housing shortage as a condition particular to big coastal cities. But in the years...

By Jesse Wegman, Image: Mr. Winter, The New York Times, July 12, 2022 The downtown of Denton, Texas, a city of about 150,000 people and two large universities just north of Dallas, exudes the energy of a fast-growing place with a sizable student population: There’s a vibrant independent music scene, museums and public art exhibits, beer gardens, a surfeit of upscale dining options, a weekly queer variety show. The city is also racially and ethnically diverse: More than 45 percent of...

By Joshua Hunt, Illustration: Antoine Cossé, The New York Times, July 13, 2022 When I was 9, my family went on a long, strange road trip. Our destination was Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Fla., and the cost of admission was a lie. It was April of 1989, and my parents said the trip couldn’t wait until summer break. As the oldest of three children, I had the job of excusing our prolonged absence by telling our school we were headed to a family funeral. I remember being touched by my teachers’...

By Gillian Brockell, Image: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, July 13, 2022 A statue of Mary McLeod Bethune was unveiled Wednesday in the U.S. Capitol, making her the first Black American in the National Statuary Hall collection. Bethune was a civil rights activist, a presidential adviser and the founder of the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, which became Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. Her statue represents the state of...

By Cecilia Nowell, Image: Ash Ponders, The Guardian, July 13, 2022 Driving along State Route 73 in eastern Arizona , it’s wide open skies and a red rock landscape, dotted with ponderosa pines, juniper bushes, yucca and prickly poppies. Just outside the White Mountain Apache town of Whiteriver, the blue roof of a gas station appears. Only, it’s not a gas station anymore. The sign that once listed gas prices now welcomes visitors to Café Gozhóó, a new restaurant celebrating Western Apache...

By Neil Mackay, Image: Gordon Terris/Hera ld & Times , The Herald, July 10, 2022 DOES Boris Johnson’s experience in boarding school explain his dysfunctional premiership? Did the psychological damage done to Johnson create a prime minister with a narcissistic personality stripped of empathy – and in turn lead to dire consequences for the British public in terms of the policies he has pursued? If you spend time talking with psychologist Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, Scotland’s leading authority on...

By Linda Jacobson, Image: AmeriCorps , The74, July 12, 2022 With a third pandemic summer underway, the Biden administration’s new push to recruit 250,000 tutors and mentors is getting a late start in helping students recover from academic and social-emotional setbacks. Organizers and experts say it could be 2023 before families and schools see the impact. “We can’t mobilize fast enough,” said Robert Balfanz, an education professor running the new National Partnership for Student Success,...

By Charlotte Cowles , The New York Times, July 11, 2022 There’s a popular cartoon meme, “ Me vs. My Parents ,” that compares “my parents at age 29” to a millennial at the same age (“me”). The 29-year-olds of yore are always making adult decisions — buying a house, having a baby, investing in a 401(k) — while the millennial contemplates getting a cat or a plant. The punchline is that the millennial won’t grow up. Or can’t afford to, depending on whom you ask. Broke millennials have been the...

By Marsha Mercer , Image: Star Max via The Associated Press , PEW, July 12, 2022 With online and retail sports betting now legal in more than 30 states, the portrait of a new problem gambler is emerging: the high school student. Although the legal age for gambling ranges from 18 to 21 depending on the state, between 60% and 80% of high school students report having gambled for money in the past year, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. The group says the pandemic and easy...

By Alison Graham, Image: Heather Rousseau, The Roanoke Times , The Publication, July 10, 2022 Julia Jones spiraled when social services took her four children away. Her husband had just left her, both of her parents were dead and she felt like she had no one to ask for help. The social workers told her to take parenting classes and go to therapy, and she did. But to her, it seemed like the harder she tried to get her kids back, the farther away they got. So instead, she kept doing what she...

By Phoebe Weston, Image: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images , The Guardian, July 11, 2022 Taking into account all the benefits nature provides to humans and redefining what it means to have a “good quality of life” is key to living sustainably on Earth, a four-year assessment by 82 leading scientists has found. A market-based focus on short-term profits and economic growth means the wider benefits of nature have been ignored, which has led to bad decisions that have reduced people’s wellbeing...

By M a c k e n z i e R y a n , Image: Rick Bowmer/AP , The Guardian, July 11, 2022 “I was horrified.” Utah State Representative Angela Romero had long known that if the supreme court ruled to overturn Roe v Wade , her state’s trigger law would come into effect and elective abortions would quickly be banned. But, even armed with that knowledge she still couldn’t believe that scenario had become reality. The district Romero represents sits on the west side of Salt Lake City, an area that...

By Jo Napolitano, Image: UnidosUS , The74, July 11, 2022 After a decade of gains in academics and a marked boost in high school graduation rates and college attendance, Latino students suffered significant setbacks during the pandemic as many attended underfunded schools and had limited internet access at home, a new report shows. Some of these children also struggled with a language barrier — as did their parents — making the switch to remote learning even tougher, according to UnidosUS,...

By Nancy Marie Spears, Image: Nick Oxford for The Imprint , The Imprint, July 9, 2022 Amid a thunderous beating of red animal-skin drums and powerful song, survivors of Indian boarding schools met in southern Oklahoma this morning with the nation’s ranking official in charge of strengthening tribal self-determination in Indian Country and upholding the government’s treaty obligations to tribes. Hundreds of former students and their descendants had come to give testimony about the legacy of...

By Nathalie Jimenez, BBC, July 9, 2022 Katrinka Cox lives the American Dream: a green trimmed lawn, poolside lake view, and $1.3m villa she calls home. She is the only black homeowner in her gated Florida community. And despite her financial success, she says her attempts to buy another property are being blocked due to her skin colour. Black Americans are almost twice as likely to be denied a mortgage than their white counterparts, figures show. And only 44% of black Americans own homes,...

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Photo: Logan Lynette for The New York Times , The New York Times, July 7, 2022 For Cynthia Philips, it was the sound of bees, willows, crickets and the hum of a metallic Tibetan bowl that helped her overcome some of her anxieties. Over Memorial Day weekend, Ms. Philips, a 64-year-old entrepreneur, drove out to a Black-owned ranch in Crawfordville, Ga. where she joined dozens of other women for a camping trip. Tents were set up under large, majestic trees and...

By Eleanor Morgan, Illustration: Janice Chang/The Observer , The Guardian, July 10, 2022 B elieve in yourself. Be empowered. Show up. Love your body. Stand tall. How many times have you seen statements like these on social media? Or used to advertise products? All point towards confidence: a particular c-word that the modern woman cannot get away from. Being self-confident is the command of our time. At some point in the past decade, women’s media seemed to shift from celebrity mockery and...

By Lori Aratani, Image: the University of Arizona, The Washington Post, July 8, 2022 A growing number of cities are searching for strategies to offset the effects of higher temperatures on their communities. In the D.C. region, eight of the 10 hottest summers on record have occurred since 2010, according to The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. Ladd Keith is an assistant professor of planning and sustainable-built environments at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture,...