I am sitting in my eighth-grade civics class learning what it is to be an American. On this day, on a boxy television screen, Gregory Peck, tall and handsome in his button-down vest, grapples with his ...

When people's needs are met, there is less violence—and less need for policing and prisons.

Ten years ago, Susan Dentzler of NPR was retained by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to investigate whether time banking (a system that lets people swap time and skill instead of money) was “a ...

Angela Davis and her sister Fania Davis were working for social justice before many of today’s activists were born. From their childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where their friends were ...

I had a fascinating breakfast conversation with my 11-year-old daughter a few days back. The night before I had a fitful dream—one that was short on plot and imagery, but chock-full of emotion. In ...

Children are learning and playing joyfully in nature again, from suburbs in Colorado to the fringes of Chicagoland. At the beginning of the 20th century, untempered industrialization and rampant ...

Until about 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were iconic everyday heroes painted with a kind of Norman Rockwell patina—generally respected because they helped most kids learn to read, write and ...

Dressed in a white shirt and pegtop trousers, the fashion of the time for young males influenced by jazz culture, José Díaz headed to a friend’s birthday party in rural Los Angeles. It was the summer ...

My arms hurt as I walked through Brooklyn on a cold December night. I was carrying a 10-pound, party-size tray of macaroni and cheese with three cheeses, cooked to just a touch beyond al dente, with a ...

As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives ...

At the height of the movement at Standing Rock, Indigenous teens half a world away in Norway were tattooing their young bodies with an image of a black snake. Derived from Lakota prophecy, the ...

A child growing up in the Costa Rican countryside is surrounded by some of the most beautiful and biodiverse landscapes in the world. The government of this tiny Central American country aims to keep ...