Children at Risk

A two-part investigation into unregulated day care in Virginia.

Part II: “After a Child’s Death, Parents Grapple With Second Guesses”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 31, 2014
Length: 39 minutes (9,846 words)

What Your 1st-Grade Life Says About the Rest of It

Lessons from a groundbreaking Johns Hopkins study of children in Baltimore: Researchers followed them through their lives and found that different factors (like summers off from school) contributed to heightened disadvantages facing lower-income children without a tradition of college attendance in their families.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 31, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,694 words)

Opportunity’s Knocks

The fastest growing job in America—working as a nurse aide—is also among the hardest. The reporter follows a single mother hoping to find a stable job and build a better life for her family:

“I’m getting desperate, to be honest,” she told her classmates. “I need something good to happen. I’m hoping this might be it.”

Her hope was placed in the fastest-growing job in America – cornerstone of the recovery, what government economists referred to as “the opportunity point” in the greatest economy in the world. It was changing bedpans, pushing wheelchairs, cleaning catheters and brushing teeth. Pay was just better than minimum wage. Burnout rates were among the highest of any career.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 31, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,646 words)

The Other Side of Deportation

An American struggles to prepare for life without her husband.

For the past five months, she had been documenting the gradual unraveling of their lives, in moments both mundane and monumental: the first visit to their home by immigration officers, the delivery of Zunaid’s deportation orders, his final trips to eat American ice cream and watch American basketball. Now only four days remained before he would be sent off to Bangladesh, a deportation that would upend not just one life but two. Zunaid would be forcibly separated from the United States after 20 years; his wife, an American citizen, would be forcibly separated from her husband.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 25, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,672 words)

Philip Welsh’s Simple Life

He chose a low-tech, simple life. Now his lack of a digital footprint is hampering the search for his killer.

By 1 p.m., Philip would leave the small yellow house in Silver Spring where he lived alone. He walked a half-block, waited for the No. 5 bus, took it to his job as a taxi dispatcher, returned home, cooked a late dinner, watched Charlie Rose and went to sleep. He never locked his front door and often left it wide open. Part was defiance. This is how I live. Part was warmth. Anyone is welcome.

Author: Dan Morse
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,934 words)

‘Ugh. I Miss It.’

Following one veteran’s difficult transition from military to civilian life. Reported by Eli Saslow, a 2014 Pulitzer recipient, and part of a multi-part series “examining the effects of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on the 2.6 million American troops who served and fought”:

He had tried to replace the war by working construction, roughnecking in the oil fields and enrolling in community college. He had tried divorce and remarriage; alcohol and drugs; biker gangs and street racing; therapy appointments and trips to a shooting range for what he called “recoil therapy.” He had tried driving two hours to the hospital in Laramie, proclaiming himself in need of help and checking himself in.

On this day, he was on his way to try what he considered the most unlikely solution yet: a 9-to-5 office job as a case worker helping troubled veterans — even though he hated office work and had so far failed to help himself.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: Apr 19, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,890 words)

The Recovery Puzzle

A story about the U.S. recovery. When a factory opens up in Ohio, the person in charge of hiring people for supervisor positions finds it difficult to find the right candidates to fill the roles:

“Dad’s Resume,” Bernie says to himself and shakes his head. He has an idea of what kind of person Dad’s Resume might be: Late 50s, early 60s. Experienced. Possibly down on his luck. The way the document is labeled makes Bernie think that maybe the guy doesn’t know much about computers and had to rely on his kid to attach the application and e-mail it in.

Dad’s Resume, he thinks, might be the quintessential story of what it means to be a job-seeker in 2014, in this time of retraining and specialized skill sets. Maybe Dad’s skills are obsolete. Maybe he’s found his world upended. The economy is creeping back to normal. Maybe he’s putting himself out there again.

Bernie wants to interview four to five candidates for each supervisory position. He makes a list of his top choices. He adds Dad’s Resume. So this guy might not have computer skills. He wants to give him a shot.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Apr 5, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,288 words)

Sinkhole of Bureaucracy

In an old Pennsylvania limestone mine in the town of Boyers, 600 federal employees are still processing paperwork by hand. A look at why the Office of Personnel Management has failed to digitize:

During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.

They couldn’t.

So now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: The Obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet.

The staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. And the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108, as total spending on the retirement system reached $55.8 million.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 22, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,085 words)

On teaching meditation in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ Residential Substance Abuse Treatment unit

The writer, on volunteering as a meditation teacher at a detention center holding men convicted of serious crimes:

It’s several weeks after that first class, and the inmates looking me over don’t seem as menacing, I realize — just interested. I don’t know what anyone’s in prison for, and that allows me to talk as I would with anyone.

But the moods inevitably vary from class to class. Deacon, who had initially struck me as easygoing, is irritable today: The sound of the fan is bugging him, and he says he can’t relax. Finally he admits, “I’m thinking about what’s going to happen when I get out, whether I’m going to be able to find a job.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Feb 27, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,815 words)

Studying Chinese to Reach His Parents

A son of Chinese immigrants learns his parents’ native tongue to learn more about who they are and where they came from:

Since we last met, a lot has happened for Daniel. He is taking intermediate Mandarin — not all that close to Shanghainese, but it’s available. And he spent a summer interning in China. He tells me the trip helped him feel “more Chinese” and opened communication with his mom. During a several-week stay at home after the internship, through broken conversation, he learned about her youth in a fishing village near Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. She even showed him a picture of her as a teenager, holding what Daniel understood to be Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Nov 2, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,473 words)