Tag: poverty

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.

In January, when Breanna went missing, Eddie wouldn’t tell anyone whether he knew where she was. He shared the temptation to vanish. He’d recently written a letter to his mom in jail saying he and Breanna were going to run away. They just didn’t know where to go. The police had been to this motel […]

So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list — a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, […]

“There often is a ‘tone’ in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery.”

If it’s not for sale here, Nicaraguans say, then you can’t buy it anywhere.

What gets published is rarely what got pitched. Sources bail, circumstances shift, conflicts fizzle. Reporting out stories that go nowhere is a frustrating, tedious business – unless, of course, they turn into something good. Such was Wyatt Stayner’s experience in putting together a story called “Getting Out of Poverty in Oregon,” this week’s College Longreads […]

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick: Colleges share symbiotic relationships with their neighboring towns, and economic disparities tend to strain those relations. At Dartmouth, the school’s wealth and privilege overshadows the surrounding area’s rural poverty. In a detailed report by Charlie Rafkin […]

“We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories. Anyone with a conscience who does this work grapples with that reality, and if they don’t, I’d worry. I lie awake at night, and I think, […]

Interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo about the difficulties, rewards—and traps—that come with reporting on the poor:  When I pick a story, I’m very much aware of the larger issues that it’s illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That’s just narrative […]

Eradicating urban poverty was a priority for Obama when he was running for president in 2008, but it has not become a focus for the president during his first term. A look at what still needs to be addressed, and the neighborhood of Roseland, where Obama got his political start: The reason for this shift […]

But a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, […]