This past month proved to be the most thought provoking for me in more ways than one.
My mother turned 77 and we laughed and joked about how time flies and how it is my turn now to experience the challenges of motherhood and the blessings and rewards that come with it.
My mother was born in Haiti to Haitian parents, and I had always thought our roots were only that of African and French people. But through our conversation, I found out that Spaniard blood runs through our family bloodline as well.
This new knowledge led me to do further researcher and to contact my dear friend Dolly Turner, who gifted me a piece of literature I will cherish and pass onto my children, Legacies, A Guide For Young Black Women Planning Their Future.
The stories in this book are designed to educate and motivate our children of all colors (and even adults) on black heritage, roots and the entire black race. The book is a combination of stories told by sixteen African Queens and almost forty successful black women.
The decision to move is an intensely personal and revealing one. We move homes because we lost a job or found a new one, because a new child was born or an older one finally left for college. We move because we have to, following a foreclosure, or because we can afford to, in search of a nicer place.
So many of life’s milestones — good or bad, qualifying for a first mortgage, surviving a hurricane — are accompanied by a moving van. In the aggregate, this means that we can add up all of the reasons why Americans move in a given year and glean something about what’s going on in their lives, and even, by extension, the economy.
Take the the 35.9 million people who moved between 2012 and 2013, according to the Census Bureau — either just down the block, into a new county or much farther away. Data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey reveals that, among their householders, 8.4 percent moved last year in search of cheaper housing. According to the data, 1.8 percent moved because of a foreclosure or eviction. Asked to pick the one reason that most contributed to their decision to move, 1.6 percent said they moved to look for work or because they lost a job.
Imagine, instead of being forced to resort to “Forest Green” for the grass in your next masterpiece, you could take Photoshop’s “eyedropper” tool to extract the color from a single, blade of grass and turn that color into ink.
Scribble is a new device that lets you do just that. The pen matches hues from the world around you and transfers them onto paper or a mobile device. For the latter, the tool works in conjunction with a stylus and a mobile app to sync the colors that attract you onto your phone or tablet. Pretty cool.
The pen is armed with a 16-bit RGB color sensor that stores the colors you tell it to. Hold the device up to your friend’s gorgeous blonde hair, a vibrant flower or the pizza crust on your plate and Scribble will analyze the color and reproduce it with ink from its refillable cartridges.
When he was convicted of three drug charges in Washington state and sentenced to prison, he owed $1,800 in court fees — $600 for each charge. Shaw told HuffPost Live on Wednesday that the judge had stated those charges could be paid after he became a free man once again.
Upon his release from prison 14 years later, however, that number had skyrocketed to $21,000 — about a 1,066 percent increase. Shaw had been told during his 10th year behind bars that while he was serving the rules had changed — those charges had been collecting interest at Washington’s staggering rate of 12 percent.
“When I go to apply for a job, when I go to try to get a vehicle, or when I try to do anything where I need to run credit, they see I owe $21,000, and that makes it hard,” Shaw said, also noting he frequently has to choose between basic everyday purchases, like food and gas, or paying off his legal financial obligations (LFOs).
The last few years have been tough for Rachel Jeantel. After the death of her friend, Trayvon Martin, she not only had to serve as a witness at his shooter’s trial, but she was also subjected to public criticism and ridicule. But the young woman refused to be held down, keeping a promise she made to Martin and continuing to achieve success.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and Jeantel’s story is a perfect example of how true that is. The 20-year-old graduated from high school with the help of a team of individuals who offered their mentorship, advice and support, The Washington Post reports.
Yesterday’s productivity report for 2014q1 was predictably negative—we already knew that real GDP fell in the quarter while employment grew apace—but I don’t read much into the noisy quarterly changes.
But then there’s this: year-over-year, productivity growth was up 1% last year and has averaged 0.8% since 2011. The figure below plots the yearly changes, which are themselves pretty noisy. What’s more instructive is the smooth trend through the numbers.
The trend suggests that the pace of productivity growth has decelerated since the first half of the 2000s and this begs an important question. There’s considerable speculation that the pace at which machines are displacing workers has accelerated. I keep hearing about “the end of work” based on the assumption that the pace of labor-saving technology—robots, AI—has accelerated.
It’s high school graduation season, which means that young adults across the country will spend the next few months in anticipatory angst over their impending college departure. But some will travel farther than others.
In a new analysis based on user data, education analytics company Niche Ink examines the profile of college-bound students. More than half — 58 percent — of high school graduates go to college within 100 miles of home, they found from their analysis of 350,000 Niche users between 2012 and 2014 who they were able to associate with both a high school and a college. Here are a few of the most interesting takeaways:
But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily undesirable places. As Niche Ink points out in its analysis, that could be due to income levels, the quality of the K-12 education students receive, college cost and quality, and how close graduates are to nearby colleges. The states in the Northeast are far smaller than the states in the South and West, so leaving is a lot easier. Students across the North of the country also tend to score highly on standardized tests, one criteria colleges use in the acceptance process. (Therefore, more high-scoring students may have more college choices and opportunity to leave.)
Rene Lima-Marin robbed two video stores 15 years ago, when he was just 19. He walked into the stores with an unloaded rifle and demanded money. He admitted to the crime and was sentenced to what he and his lawyer believed was a 16-year-sentence. After 10 years of serving time, Lima-Marin was set free. He got married, fathered two children and purchased a home. He swore he would never do anything to jeopardize the new life he had created.
Then, earlier this year, the life he had built came crumbling down when a judge, citing a clerical error, sent him back to prison to finish a 98-year sentence.
State legislators who support voter ID laws are motivated in no small part by racial bias, according to a new study from the University of Southern California. The study finds strong evidence that “discriminatory intent underlies legislative support for voter identification laws.”
The findings raise questions about the constitutionality of voter ID laws, which the Supreme Court affirmed in 2007 on the basis that Indiana’s strict law represented a “generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation.” For quick background, these laws require registered voters to show some sort of government-issued ID before they vote — supporters say they’re necessary to prevent voter fraud, while opponents counter that they disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups. For more, see ProPublica’s excellent backgrounder on the topic.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Thursday addressed the reactions to her column about a bad marijuana edibles trip she experienced in Colorado, saying she was focused “more on the fun than the risks” and calling her experiment “ill-advised.”
“I wrote in the column that I take responsibility for not knowing enough about what I was doing,” Dowd wrote in a statement obtained by The Cannabist, a marijuana news site operated by the Denver Post. “I was focused more on the fun than the risks. In that sense, I’m probably like many other people descending on Denver.”
