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.
poverty
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
Plasma For Sale (Used) — $20 a Pop
Sarah Smarsh’s brother has sold his plasma for the last decade to make ends meet under mounting credit card debt and student loans.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Blood Brother
Sarah Smarsh writes about how rich drug companies buy plasma from the poor and working poor — literally feeding their wealth with one of the few renewable resources the poor have to sell — their blood.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Grenfell Tower: London, England’s ‘Katrina Moment’
How gentrification, apathy, and government negligence failed the residents of Grenfell Tower.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Grenfell Was No Ordinary Accident
Henry Wismayer reports on the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. The worst fire disaster in London since the Blitz during World War II, the blaze claimed 80 lives. To outsiders, London, England may appear to be a “a paragon of functioning multiculturalism,” however the Grenfell fire has become England’s “Katrina moment” — the catastrophic […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
The Boy With the Coin-Filled Cellophane Cigarette Wrapper, and Me
Meeting an apparently less fortunate child in her daughter’s kindergarten class transports Amber Leventry back to her own painful youth.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Poor, Gay, Black, and Southern: America’s Hidden H.I.V. Crisis
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.
Posted inEditor's Pick
America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic
Ground zero in the AIDS crisis happened on June 5th, 1981, when the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report identified five cases of pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in previously healthy white men in Los Angeles. The sixth case — a gay African-American man who had contracted PCP and cytomegalovirus — went undocumented and that critical omission […]
Posted inReading List
Rich Teeth, Poor Teeth: Life Along the Dental Divide
Recent reporting on dental care in America shows that small problems can have enormous medical consequences.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Dorothy Allison on How America Devalues Those Who are ‘Other’
Dorothy Allison on how American culture “inherently devalues the poor, the working class, the darks, the queer, the other.”