Tag: poverty

“Yet money was a lie—pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor, and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value.”

Asking difficult questions often comes at a cost.

Disneyland’s painfully low wages make for an unmagical kingdom.

“There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history — not lack of talent for something else.”

Sharmila Sen grew up understanding distinctions between castes and religions, between the educated and the illiterate. Race was a distinction she didn’t understand until she came to America.

Three meals a day don’t erase the scars of a childhood marked by hunger, violence, and loneliness.

It’s time to end the pernicious myth that giving money directly to panhandlers won’t help them.

Although many states legally allow the use of medical marijuana, federal law still prohibits its possession in federally subsidized housing, so many residents live in fear of eviction.

“What seemed to me life-saving was that I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t put a candy-coated gloss on anything.”

Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign.

Lilly Dancyger speaks out about her humble upbringing.

An amateur geographer travels to an undocumented island off the coast of Haiti after stumbling upon it on Google Earth.

Many American cities offer the homeless free bus tickets to move somewhere, but do these relocation programs do vunerable populations more harm than good?

Melissa Chadburn goes undercover as a temp worker.

Two baseball teams — one from the tough streets of West Oakland and the other from Havana — decide to play each other. When they meet in Cuba, a Berkeley documentary filmmaker captures it all.

Sarah Smarsh’s brother has sold his plasma for the last decade to make ends meet under mounting credit card debt and student loans.

How gentrification, apathy, and government negligence failed the residents of Grenfell Tower.

Meeting an apparently less fortunate child in her daughter’s kindergarten class transports Amber Leventry back to her own painful youth.

If you have H.I.V in New York or San Francisco, you can life a long, healthy life. Not so if you live in the Southern United States and you’re poor, black, gay and/or bisexual.

Recent reporting on dental care in America shows that small problems can have enormous medical consequences.

Dorothy Allison on how American culture “inherently devalues the poor, the working class, the darks, the queer, the other.”

The emerging science of epigenetics argues that poverty can change our genetic expression.

Daniel Patterson, and the challenges of bringing fast healthy food to the impoverished neighborhoods trapped in food deserts.

Ubiquitous digital payments: harbinger of a glorious future, or smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

In Wired, Chris Colin writes about the determined reverend whose church provides services to the Tenderloin’s most disenfranchised residents, and helps gentrifying tech industry workers engage with the marginalized neighbors their presence directly effects.

When writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through California, Ohio, and Maine to labor alongside the working poor, t hey found lots of things they expected — long hours, low pay, financial uncertainty — and one thing th ey didn’t: hope.

At Pacific Standard, Rachel Nuwer reports on the aging homeless population of California and how something seemingly innocuous — like forgetting to renew your driver’s licence on time — can instigate a downward spiral into poverty and homelessness that skyrocketing rent and street-inflicted trauma can extend, sometimes indefinitely.

It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs.” Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen.” These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at […]

A reading list on the decline of Venezuela — and the stories of different people affected by the violence and instability in the country.

At Narratively, Anthony Taille goes underground into New York’s tunnels to tell the stories of the legendary Mole People.