Tag: local authorities
Why Don’t We Teach People How to Parent?
There are just some things you don’t do without preparation. You’re not meant to drive a car without taking lessons and passing a test. You aren’t supposed to scuba dive without certification. You can’t teach—or practice law, or therapy, or cosmetology—without first proving your knowledge. But you can become a parent without any training at all—and that’s a pretty high-stakes position.
Parents today arguably face steeper expectations than ever before. Over the past half century or so, “intensive parenting” has
The U.S. Child-Welfare System Fails Its Children
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.
For one, I believed that orphanages were
Rip Currents Don’t Have to Be So Deadly
This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.
On a sweltering day in July 2019, Summer Locknick plodded along Cavendish Beach on the coast of Canada’s Prince Edward Island, among hundreds of people lounging on the red-tinted sand. The air smelled of sunscreen as the visitors worked on their tans, blew up inflatable rafts, and cooled off in the sea. Locknick, however, was not there to relax. With a GPS unit and a tablet in hand, she circulated in the
American Politics Has a Harassment Problem
By now, the stories are familiar. Most, though not all, start on social media: a post on Facebook or Twitter identifies a name, and then the threats begin. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, conspiracy theorists focused on a video of a voting-machine technician at work in Gwinnett County, Georgia. One Twitter user published the young man’s name, declaring him “guilty of treason,” along with, according to the Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, an animation of a swaying noose. Around
The Battle for the Donbas Demands Impossible Choices
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.
“This was before