Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Podcast: Celebrating democracy's small victories

Podcast: Celebrating democracy's small victories

Amid election deniers and political polarization, it's easy to overlook the times when democracy is actually working. This episode features a hopeful conversation about resident-centered government. Elected officials and administrative staff like city planners often have the best intentions when it comes to development and redevelopment, but political and professional incentives push them to pursue projects that lure in outsiders rather than serving people who live in their communities.

This episode’s guest is Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School and the author of The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America. The book tells the stories of revitalization efforts in Stockton, California, Josephine, Oregon, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Detroit, Michigan. In each instance, residents organized to fix small problems that turned into large-scale change. It's a model that anyone can replicate and our democracy will be stronger for it.


https://open.spotify.com

Read More

Kids' Healthcare Can't Withstand Medicaid Cuts

The risk to children’s hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid funding, is often unrecognized. Children’s health needs greater investment, not less.

Getty Images, FS Productions

Kids' Healthcare Can't Withstand Medicaid Cuts

Last year, my daughter’s elementary school science teacher surprised me with a midday phone call. During a nature center field trip, my eight year old fell off a balance beam and seriously hurt her arm. I picked my daughter up and drove straight to the children’s hospital, where I knew she would get everything she needed. Hours later, we were headed home, injury addressed, pain controlled, appropriate follow-up secured, and her arm in a cast after x-rays revealed fractures across both forearm bones.

That children’s hospital, part of a regional academic medical center, is thirty minutes away from our home. Its proximity assures me that we have access to everything my kids could possibly need medically. Until this year, I took this access for granted. Now, as the structure of the classroom yields to summer’s longer, more freeform days, some of the nation’s most important programs scaffolding kids’ health could collapse under the pressure imposed by proposed legislative budget cuts. As a pediatric doctor and as a parent, slashing Medicaid concerns me the most.

Keep ReadingShow less
Students in a classroom.​

Today, Hispanic-Serving Institutions enroll 64 percent of all Latino college students.

Getty Images, andresr

Tennessee’s Attack on Federal Support for Hispanic-Serving Colleges Hurts Us All

The Tennessee Attorney General has partnered with a conservative legal nonprofit to sue the U.S. Department of Education over programming that supports Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), colleges, and universities where at least 25% of the undergraduate full-time equivalent student enrollment is Hispanic. On its face, this action claims to oppose “discriminatory” federal funding. In reality, it is part of a broader and deeply troubling trend: a coordinated effort to dismantle educational opportunity for communities of color under the guise of anti-DEI rhetoric.

As a scholar of educational policy and leadership in higher education, I believe we must confront policies that narrow access and undermine equity in education for those who have been historically underserved. What is happening in Tennessee is not just a misguided action—it’s a self-inflicted wound that will harm the state's economic future and deepen historical inequality.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump Shows That Loyalty Is All That Matters to Him

Guests in the audience await the arrival of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence during the Federalist Society's Executive Branch Review Conference at The Mayflower Hotel on April 25, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images/TNS

Trump Shows That Loyalty Is All That Matters to Him

Last week, the Court of International Trade delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s global trade war. It found that the worldwide tariffs Trump unveiled on “Liberation Day” as well his earlier tariffs pretextually aimed at stopping fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada (as if) were beyond his authority. The three-judge panel was surely right about the Liberation Day tariffs and probably right about the fentanyl tariffs, but there’s a better case that, while bad policy, the fentanyl tariffs were not unlawful.

Please forgive a lengthy excerpt of Trump’s response on Truth Social, but it speaks volumes:

Keep ReadingShow less