News Day

Though thinking and writing and worrying about the awful news takes up a lot of time and emotional space, I’m also enjoying summer’s simple pleasures, with a little more time this year than in the past several years. So here are three of my favorites: Continue reading →

Adel Daoud was the teenage son of immigrants, attending a neighborhood Islamic high school when the FBI started talking to him online. According to his mother,

“Daoud required extra assistance in school, and was heavily dependent on her: ‘He’s not the person with a complete mind. He didn’t talk until five. He was the last one of my kids to talk. He doesn’t even talk Arabic….like the rest of our family, because he’s slow.’” Illusion of Justice, p. 28

Continue reading →

UPDATED: 7/30/2014: Republicans care about poor people! Yes, they do, and to prove it, Paul Ryan (R-WI) is proposing a poverty plan. His plan comes just in time for the 2014 election campaign, and maybe also in time to feature in a 2016 presidential bid. Unlike FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s War on Poverty, however, this is a plan that will make more people poorer. Paul Ryan loves poor people so much that he wants more of them! Continue reading →

Have you heard about New York’s new “poor doors?” Seems that in return for tax and zoning breaks for giant luxury apartment complexes, the city required that developers provide some affordable housing units in the buildings. So the developers designed the building with a back door to be used by tenants of the affordable units. Continue reading →

How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb?

“We just report the facts, we don’t change them.”

I don’t believe that for a minute.  Continue reading →

Photo of pink mustache car by Quinn Dombrowski, photo of taxi by Jeffrey Zeldman, both Creative Commons license.

The Minneapolis city council’s new regulations for Lyft, Uber, and the city’s cab companies offer legalization for the transnational, multimillion-dollar Uber and Lyft “Transportation Network Companies,” some breaks to the city’s taxi companies, and next to nothing for hard-working taxi drivers. Continue reading →

Links are the best thing the internet has given journalism. They lead back to the original quote, the book, the article, the report, the statute, the data. Like footnotes in academic writing, links keep the writer honest.  (Except when they don’t — like students with footnotes, some journalists do misrepresent what linked sources say.) Continue reading →

During the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees arrived in the United States. Like the child refugees fleeing Central America in 2014, they were met with hostility, rejection and deportation. Though entitled to protection under international law, the Central American refugees of the 1980s and the child refugees today do not receive that protection in fact. Continue reading →

Dave introduced himself to my college writing class: he had a new baby, a full-time job and plenty of confidence. Rose asked for patience: she couldn’t afford the textbook and her student financial aid wouldn’t arrive for a couple of weeks. She was also living in a homeless shelter. Ann arrived with cheerful enthusiasm and what she told me was a sixth grade reading level. Louis was working full-time and needed to get a degree to continue to be employable in the field he had worked in for decades. Henry was still wearing an ankle bracelet as a condition of parole, and had excellent writing skills, but huge challenges in family situation and housing. Bonita was returning to college after 22 years, urged on by her now-college-graduate children.

I’ve changed the names to protect their privacy, but the stories are real. Continue reading →