Vann R. Newkirk II
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Sean Rayford / AP Is Rural America Getting Tired of Tough-on-Crime Policies?
Across political, racial, and geographic lines, more Americans seem ready to move past the age of mass incarceration.
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Mark Thiessen / AP / Joseph Sohm / ... American Voters Are Turning to Direct Democracy
In many states, the most important policy changes this year won’t come from legislation, but from ballot initiatives.
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Justin Sullivan / Getty White Supremacy Is the Achilles Heel of American Democracy
Even in a high-tech era, fears about minority political agency are the most reliable way to destabilize the U.S. political system.
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Horace Cort / AP / Mike Cassese / ... King's Death Gave Birth to Hip-Hop
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led directly to hip-hop, an era of black American culture, politics, and art that is often contrasted with his legacy.
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Bob Strong / Reuters Police Shootings Are Also Gun Violence
Emphasizing policing as the primary means of addressing shootings will only lead to more deadly confrontations between officers and the citizens they’re sworn to protect.
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Steve Schapiro How Martin Luther King Jr. Recruited John Lewis
The Georgia congressman on what it was like to know the iconic activist
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Jason E. Miczek / AP The Weaponized Census
A move by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the decennial survey would erode its utility—and the political power of immigrant-dense regions.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters The People Trump's War on Drugs Will Actually Punish
His campaign, backed by the Justice Department, only reinforces a law-enforcement paradigm that puts people of color in prison.
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Jerome Delay / AP Fixing the World's Oldest Health Problem
A new intervention from researchers, philanthropists, and government officials in Mali uses universal health care and basic public-health strategies to address child mortality.
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Elijah Nouvelage / Reuters Unplugging From the Internet Nearly Destroyed Me
A totally true account of a time I went off-line
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Robert F. Bukaty / AP Medicaid Expansion's Troubled Future
The Affordable Care Act’s extension of public insurance to poor adults might finally make its way into every state. But those inroads could come with a cost.
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Paul Sequeira / Getty The Whitewashing of King’s Assassination
The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.
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Daniela Yohannes Where Fantasy Meets Black Lives Matter
A much-anticipated young-adult debut taps into a tradition of speculative fiction rooted in African culture.
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Gerald Herbert / AP Trump's EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real
A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency finds that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air—even as the agency seeks to roll back regulations on pollution.
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MediaPunch / AP Arming Educators Violates the Spirit of the Second Amendment
The constitutional provision enshrined the principle of individual liberty—and extending a militarized state into the schools would only undermine it.
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Reuters The Power of the Parkland Town Hall
The CNN-hosted event highlighted the voices of student activists, and showed why the gun debate might actually be different this time around.
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Marvel Studios The Provocation and Power of Black Panther
The biggest success of the new Marvel film isn’t representation, but its contemplation of identity, responsibility, and the future of a diaspora in an interconnected world.
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Julie Carr Smyth / AP An End to Gerrymandering in Ohio?
A bipartisan compromise that just passed the state Senate would require minority-party support for political maps, and would limit the number of communities that could be splintered.
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Gary Cameron / Reuters The Real Lessons From Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform
The 1996 creation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program effectively killed cash assistance. Now, Republicans want to use it as a model for the rest of the social safety net.
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David Tulis / AP Is the CDC Losing Control?
The country’s flagship public-health agency is facing internal scandal and funding issues that will test its ability to respond to outbreaks on the horizon.
