The stigma of a criminal conviction can be a major barrier to community reentry for recently released prisoners. A December 2021 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics highlighted the employment barrier faced by the more than 50,000 who were incarcerated, with 33 percent...

I recently saw the face of a friend whom I had never met before. In a video call to a California state prison facility, I was finally face-to-face—albeit via video chat—with Dominic Williams, who is serving a sentence of life in prison without the...

War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent it from happening, according to anthropological research. We are living at a critical time in the history of humanity in which preventing and divesting from war...

In July 2015, when two Black Lives Matter activists challenged liberal candidates running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, the late Kevin Alexander Gray told me in an interview, “all candidates ought to have an agenda that deals with the issues that the Black...

Families from miles around lined up outside the United Steelworkers (USW) hall in Tonawanda, New York, a few years ago, eager for a share of the 30,000 books, from biographies to sci-fi thrillers, that Tom O’Shei and other union members handed out for free. ...

The public sector in the U.S. has been shrinking rapidly since the 1990s as a deluge of privatization has, to various degrees, overtaken many so-called public services and institutions. Public education, for example, has been increasingly privatized by way of racist school voucher programs,...

Early in the school year, a kindergartner on Joni Meyer’s school bus got motion sickness and threw up all over himself—and his brother, his cousin and his laptop. ...

Every revolution starts small—with an idea that the status quo isn’t quite right and a change needs to happen—but building a social movement from the ground up means putting in serious work. Connecting and organizing people who are like-minded, even at a local level, without...

If you went to public school in the U.S., chances are good that you remember school lunch as tater tots, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, burgers with fries and pizza slices so soaked through with oil that kids would pad them with napkins in attempts to...

Charter school industry lobbyists, who appear to have lost a fight in the U.S. House of Representatives over an appropriations bill that cuts federal funding to charter schools operated by for-profit businesses, are rolling out a campaign to defend their taxpayer revenues in...