LA’s Latest Homelessness Problem: Expensive Toilets
Here’s the latest controversy over LA’s growing homelessness problem: L.A. has estimated that staffing and operating a mobile bathroom can cost more than $300,000 annually — a price tag that has galled some politicians. During budget talks this spring, city officials estimated that providing toilets and showers for every homeless encampment in need would cost…
The South Isn’t Really Doing All That Badly
The Wall Street Journal says today that the South, after years of improvement, is now falling further behind the Northeast and other regions. Here’s the chart: The Journal’s chart starts at 1890, which makes it a little hard to see that, in fact, the South’s convergence with other regions had pretty much stopped by 1980.…
Here’s Why the Black-White IQ Gap Is Almost Certainly Environmental
A reader emails me: Twice now you have asserted that your “… read of the evidence is that the black-white IQ gap is almost certainly accounted for by environmental factors.” Would you please do me the favor of listing (in either a reply email or in Mother Jones) one or two of the sources for…
Remember the BP Oil Spill? These Cleanup Workers Are Still Suffering After 9 Years.
Oil from the BP oil spill is seen on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.Julie Dermansky/Corbis/Getty This story was originally published by the Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nine years ago, I traveled down to the bustling Louisiana bayou fishing town of Venice, where the road south along the Mississippi River…
Digging Into the Messy History of “Latinx” Helped Me Embrace My Complex Identity
Getty Images (13); Flowers: RawpixelIn June 2016, a Muslim American man entered Orlando’s Pulse nightclub during its weekly Latin Night and gunned down 49 people, most of them gay or bisexual. In the dizzying aftermath of the tragedy, I was assigned to write an opinion piece for HuffPost about how then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was…