Mother’s Mind

A look at new findings on postpartum depression and maternal mental illness:

In New York, State Senator Liz Krueger has introduced a bill to encourage screening and treatment, a proposal that will most likely pass and be approved by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who vetoed a 2013 bill on technical grounds but encouraged the revised legislation.

Jeanne Marie Johnson, in Oregon, may have benefited from state laws encouraging awareness of postpartum mental illness. At her daughter, Pearl’s, two-week pediatric checkup, Ms. Johnson received a questionnaire. Her answers raised red flags and were forwarded to her midwife and a social worker. Ms. Johnson also called a number for a hotline the hospital gave her after a panic attack.

She saw a social worker, but resisted taking medication for months. Afraid to be alone with Pearl, she would insist her mother come over when her husband was out. “I called the doctor hotline constantly,” with nonexistent concerns, “because if I was talking on the phone I wouldn’t do anything harmful.”

Part Two: A Case Study

Published: Jun 16, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,482 words)

Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes

A fourth grader at Public School 397 in Brooklyn struggles as he prepares for the exams aligned with the Common Core standards.

Ms. Alcindor did not know what to do about his academic difficulties. Her English was too limited to be of much help with homework, and she had never heard of the Common Core. She was away from the house most days, working a $10.50-an-hour job as a nursing assistant, and the triplets’ father no longer lived with them. But Ms. Alcindor knew that Haelleca (pronounced HALL-UH-kuh) was doing something right, judging by her pile of awards and her zeal for reading. “You must help your brothers,” she told her daughter.

Published: Jun 14, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,098 words)

The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule

How did Leo Sharp—a day-lily farmer, World War II veteran, and great-grandfather—become a drug mule for Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel?

Sharp’s lawyer, Darryl A. Goldberg, said that it was unclear precisely when Sharp began working with the cartel, but he believed it started at the day-lily farm. “He has Mexican fellas working on the farms,” Goldberg said. “They happen to know people who introduced him to other people who asked him if he wanted to get involved in something.” His first assignments were to ferry cash, he said. “And then it morphed into something bigger.”

Law-enforcement authorities said the cartel deliberately recruited couriers who played against type. Walter Ogden, a 57-year-old man from Oklahoma, was another trusted driver. Ogden has been on disability since 2010 and has had four heart attacks, according to his lawyer. He was a former heavy-equipment operator for an excavation company in Oklahoma City and, like Sharp, had no criminal record.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,135 words)

Life in the Valley of Death

In Srebrenica, reconciliation between Muslims and Serbs have remained difficult nearly 20 years after the Bosnian Genocide:

Among the Muslims who have returned, the outspoken Fazila Efendic is the anomaly. Far more common is the case of Suleiman Mehmedovic, a 31-year-old laborer who lives with his wife and two children in a tiny apartment at the edge of the town of Srebrenica. Only 12 in July 1995, he left the enclave on a bus with his mother, but his father perished; his wife lost her father and all five brothers. “We just keep to ourselves,” Suleiman said of his life today. “I work alongside Serbs, and it’s O.K. We just never talk about what happened at all.”

To Milos Milanovic, a Serbian member of the Srebrenica City Council, that’s the best that can be hoped for. “There is never any discussion about these things, only arguing,” he told me. During the war, Milanovic, now 50, was a member of the Srspka armed forces and was present at the fall of Srebrenica. “It’s mostly propaganda,” he said of the numbers killed in the July 1995 massacre. “The Muslims have even presented our victims as their victims. They need to keep the death count high to present Serbs as the only criminals and to cover up their own war crimes.”

Published: May 29, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,008 words)

The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas

A profile of poet Patricia Lockwood (“Rape Joke,” Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals):

“People don’t necessarily respond as their best selves in the moment. The initial conversations were not totally ideal. But when you make art out of something, they get another chance.”

Published: May 30, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,255 words)

Never Forgetting a Face

Joseph Atick, a pioneer of facial-recognition systems, is now cautioning against their unfettered use:

In 2001, his worst-case scenario materialized. A competitor supplied the Tampa police with a face-recognition system; officers covertly deployed it on fans attending Super Bowl XXXV. The police scanned tens of thousands of fans without their awareness, identifying a handful of petty criminals, but no one was detained.

Journalists coined it the “Snooper Bowl.” Public outrage and congressional criticism ensued, raising issues about the potential intrusiveness and fallibility of face recognition that have yet to be resolved.

Dr. Atick says he thought this fiasco had doomed the industry: “I had to explain to the media this was not responsible use.”

Published: May 17, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,157 words)

Who Gets to Graduate?

High-achieving students from low-income families often don’t make it through college. Why?

There are thousands of students like Vanessa at the University of Texas, and millions like her throughout the country — high-achieving students from low-income families who want desperately to earn a four-year degree but who run into trouble along the way. Many are derailed before they ever set foot on a campus, tripped up by complicated financial-aid forms or held back by the powerful tug of family obligations. Some don’t know how to choose the right college, so they drift into a mediocre school that produces more dropouts than graduates. Many are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans. And some do what Vanessa was on the verge of doing: They get to a good college and encounter what should be a minor obstacle, and they freak out. They don’t want to ask for help, or they don’t know how. Things spiral, and before they know it, they’re back at home, resentful, demoralized and in debt.

Author: Paul Tough
Published: May 15, 2014
Length: 34 minutes (8,577 words)

The Real House Candidates of Beverly Hills

Inside the race to represent California’s absurdly wealthy — and sometimes just absurd — 33rd District:

A few days later, I was sitting in Marianne Williamson’s home in Brentwood, a luxury apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard. It is a warm and vast space, filled with books, art and frantic activity. “Can someone hand me my glasses?” Williamson called out, and an aide quickly fetched them. She was sitting in her living room, Googling around for a quote from Thomas Jefferson that she wanted to share with me. “You know the one,” she said. “It’s on the monument.” She said she would email it to me.

Published: Apr 24, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,175 words)

The Tale of Two Schools

Students from University Heights and Fieldston are just six miles apart, but the students live very different lives from one another. They’ve come together to share their stories with each other:

MARIENELY: “People in my community have welfare and Section 8. My family doesn’t receive that aid anymore, but we once did, so I know how it feels to let people know you receive help from the government. Sometimes I get stressed just seeing my mother working so hard to get me what I want and need. The only thing she asks for is for me to do great in school, but I wish I could get a job to help her out. She’s my motivation in life.”

ASHLEY: “I am a TEAK Fellow at Fieldston. TEAK is an organization that helps low-income students gain admission to prestigious private high schools and colleges. I wish conversations about class and wealth would happen at Fieldston, but socioeconomic status is one of the hardest things to have open conversations about. How do you make people feel safe and included without being too vulnerable?”

Published: May 3, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,419 words)

The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie

Sullivan searches for the real story behind two phantom voices that recorded songs for Paramount in the early 1930s:

No grave site, no photograph. Forget that — no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves — the fewer than 10 surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands — these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.

Published: Apr 12, 2014
Length: 55 minutes (13,953 words)