CityLab: More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus

 A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, after much speculation about emptied downtowns and the prospect of remote work, the clearest picture yet is emerging about how people moved. There is no urban exodus; perhaps it’s more of an urban shuffle. Despite talk of mass moves to Florida and Texas, data shows most people who did move stayed close to where they came from—although Sun Belt regions that were popular even before the pandemic did see gains.

Across the U.S., the number of people making moves that they defined as permanent was up a modest 3% between March 2020 and February 2021. Even with that increase, national migration rates are likely still at historic lows. But zoom in to a few of America’s densest and most expensive metro regions and the picture is more dramatic, with the percentage increase in moves well into the double digits.

Those Americans who did move accelerated a trend that predates the pandemic: Dense core counties of major U.S. metro areas saw a net decrease in flow into the city, while other suburbs and some smaller cities saw net gains. In other words, people moved outward. Outward to the suburbs of their own core metro area, but also farther out, to satellite cities or even other major urban centers that might still give people proximity to their region. As CityLab contributor Richard Florida has noted, the pandemic compressed into a matter of months moves that might have happened in the next few years anyway. [...]

Even for people who said their moves were permanent, wealth was the dominant explanation for the jump in moves in New York City’s five boroughs. While people across incomes continued to move around as they had before the pandemic, it was higher-income zip codes that saw a sharp change in movement at the height of the pandemic.

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Freakonomics: How Do You Reopen a Country?

We speak with a governor, a former C.D.C. director, a pandemic forecaster, a hard-charging pharmacist, and a pair of economists — who say it’s all about the incentives. (Pandemillions, anyone?)

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The New Yorker: Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not

Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel and socializing, to submit themselves to blood draws and immunization shots—even when there’s scant evidence that they’re directly at risk. [...]

The lead spokesperson should be a scientist. Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting C.D.C. director and an E.I.S. alumnus, explained to me, “If you have a politician on the stage, there’s a very real risk that half the nation is going to do the opposite of what they say.” During the H1N1 outbreak of 2009—which caused some twelve thousand American deaths, infections in every state, and seven hundred school closings—Besser and his successor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, gave more than a hundred press briefings. President Barack Obama spoke publicly about the outbreak only a few times, and generally limited himself to telling people to heed scientific experts and promising not to let politics distort the government’s response. “The Bush Administration did a good job of creating the infrastructure so that we can respond,” Obama said at the start of the pandemic, and then echoed the sohco by urging families, “Wash your hands when you shake hands. Cover your mouth when you cough. I know it sounds trivial, but it makes a huge difference.”At no time did Obama recommend particular medical treatments, nor did he forecast specifics about when the pandemic would end. [...]

Public-health officials say that American culture poses special challenges. Our freedoms to assemble, to speak our minds, to ignore good advice, and to second-guess authority can facilitate the spread of a virus. “We’re not China—we can’t order people to stay inside,” Besser said. “Democracy is a great thing, but it means, for something like covid-19, we have to persuade people to coöperate if we want to save their lives.” [...]

Today, New York City has the same social-distancing policies and business-closure rules as Seattle. But because New York’s recommendations came later than Seattle’s—and because communication was less consistent—it took longer to influence how people behaved. According to data collected by Google from cell phones, nearly a quarter of Seattleites were avoiding their workplaces by March 6th. In New York City, another week passed until an equivalent percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced covid-19 deaths by fifty to eighty per cent. Another former New York City health commissioner told me that “de Blasio was just horrible,” adding, “Maybe it was unintentional, maybe it was his arrogance. But, if you tell people to stay home and then you go to the gym, you can’t really be surprised when people keep going outside.”

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Vox: Governors are starting to close their borders. The implications are staggering

As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, “we are one people with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states.” The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), “was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the Constitution created.” [...]

Thus, there are two potential reasons why Abbott’s order may be legitimate. The first is that it applies to Texans and non-Texans alike — a Houston resident who returns home from a trip to Newark will spend two weeks in isolation, just like a New York resident who travels to Dallas to visit a family member. The second is that Abbott has a “substantial reason” for imposing this order. He believes that it will reduce the number of people who enter Texas carrying a terrible disease. [...]

The premise of Edwards — indeed, the premise of the post-New Deal order — is that the federal government would provide a baseline of health, prosperity, and security to the nation as a whole. In return, the states would give up their role as the sole providers of “assistance to the needy,” and with it their power to close their borders to poor Americans.

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Freakonomics: Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373 Rebroadcast)

As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?

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Politico: The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump’s Mini-Me

Collins, 69, leveraged his notoriety as the first Republican member of Congress to endorse Trump to hold on to his deep-red district in western New York despite a federal indictment. Then, on Monday, after more than a year of insisting on his innocence, he resigned and pleaded guilty to two felony insider trading charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the FBI. His sentencing is scheduled for January and he faces up to five years in federal prison for each count. [...]

Collins criticized national outlets for printing “outright lies” and ripped a page from Trump’s playbook by calling his hometown paper “the fake Buffalo News.” He exploited conservatives’ resentment of the press and went to war with The Buffalo News in his fundraising emails. For those who had watched Collins’ rise in politics, his Trumpian treatment of the press seemed out of character for Collins. Up until the News began to cover Collins’ involvement with Innate, he had a more or less cordial relationship with the paper. [...]

Like Trump, he also never really stepped away from his businesses, despite campaign promises to do otherwise. As he unwound his relationships with several companies before becoming county executive, he remained an unpaid director and lead shareholder of Virionyx, a New Zealand-based biopharmaceutical company now known as Innate. Collins argued that he had stayed on because he had a responsibility to his investors, a cadre of wealthy Buffalonians that included then-Sabres coach Lindy Ruff. [...]

His fiscal conservatism could curdle into a Scrooge-like miserliness. In 2010, he dealt a blow to working mothers when he decreased child care assistance, a cut that would reverberate into the next county executive’s term. As he searched for ways to trim the county budget, he took aim at small theaters, libraries and cultural organizations in the Buffalo area, slashing operational funding in the 2011 budget for all but 10 of the largest cultural groups in the county.

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CityLab: The Hidden Winners in Neighborhood Gentrification

But without data to explain the changes happening underneath the very visible signs of gentrification—lofts, e-scooters, farmers’ markets—it isn’t easy to describe the costs, or who bears them. According to one just-released study, original residents gain more from gentrification than the traditional neighborhood narrative lets on. And the harms of gentrification, while hard to fully gauge, may not be so severe for original residents, especially for those who stay but even for those who choose to leave. What if the conventional wisdom about gentrification is kind of wrong? [...]

The study looks at original residents of low-income, central-city neighborhoods of the 100 largest metro areas using census data from 2000 and American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2014. Using the earlier data as a base, researchers Quentin Brummet and Davin Reed tracked changes in educational achievement and household status among less-educated renters and homeowners as well as more-educated renters and homeowners. While some of these neighborhoods saw gentrification, not all did, providing a basis for comparison.

For less-educated renters, who are among a neighborhood’s more vulnerable demographic groups, gentrification drives out-migration by 6 percentage points. Migration among renters is high whether a neighborhood becomes fancy or not: The research finds that 68 percent of less-educated renters and 79 percent of of more-educated renters move over the course of a decade. So, on average, gentrification spurs around 10 percent of moves for less-educated renters (and much less so for renters with more education). [...]

Not all the changes wrought by gentrification count as improvement! The paper acknowledges that rising property taxes can be difficult for existing homeowners to afford, for example—although the researchers still put higher values in the win category for homeowners. While moving from a gentrifying neighborhood may not lead to observably worse outcomes, the act of displacement itself, leaving behind family and community, packs negative social and psychological effects, as the researchers recognize. Culturally, gentrification involves neighborhood changes that can lead original residents to feel that they don’t belong.

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Politico: Cuomo signs law allowing New York to hand over Trump's taxes

“Tax secrecy is paramount — the exception being for bonafide investigative and law enforcement purposes," Cuomo said in a release. "By amending the law enforcement exception in New York State tax code to include Congressional tax-related committees, this bill gives Congress the ability to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities, strengthen our democratic system and ensure that no one is above the law."

The law allows the state Department of Taxation and Finance to share returns of top federal, state or local government officials — though not private citizens — with three congressional committees that have jurisdiction over tax matters at the request of their respective chair. [...]

It’s just the latest broadside from Empire State Democrats against the president. The state attorney general’s office, now headed by Tish James, has opened multiple probes into Trump’s businesses and charitable dealings, including the forced shutdown of the Trump Foundation in December 2018.

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The Guardian view on abortion: protecting a human right

No law can end abortions, however severe its restrictions and however harsh its penalties. Each day almost 70,000 unsafe abortions are carried out around the world, and they are vastly more likely to happen in countries with strict laws. What such legislation does do is force some women to continue pregnancies against their wishes, while risking the lives and wellbeing of others. Women in the US have seen their ability to terminate pregnancies dismantled piece by piece. Now states are racing to outlaw or dramatically curb abortions with extreme and unconstitutional bills. The aim is to directly challenge Roe v Wade, the US supreme court ruling that established that abortion is legal before the foetus is viable outside the womb, at around 24 weeks. Last Tuesday, the governor of Georgia signed a bill essentially banning abortions after six weeks from 2020. Some described it as a sign that men who wish to control women’s bodies have no idea of how they actually work. More likely, those who pushed hardest for the change understand all too well that many women will not know they are pregnant until it is too late.

Five other states have signed similar bills; several more are considering them. (Others have introduced more incremental curbs.) The Alabama senate will this week consider a near-total ban on abortion – with prison sentences of up to 99 years for doctors – which Republicans initially tried to sneak through without even a vote. The state’s lieutenant governor said he believes Roe v Wade will be overturned thanks to Donald Trump’s appointment of conservative jurists. [...]

At this grim time there are signs of hope. New York state has sought to bolster abortion rights this year. Chile somewhat eased its ban in 2017. And last year’s landslide vote in favour of repealing Ireland’s near-total ban resonated worldwide. Yet women in Northern Ireland are no closer to enjoying the same rights as those elsewhere in the UK, even though the supreme court believes the ban there incompatible with human rights legislation. They can now access free abortion care in England, but too much confusion endures and women in abusive relationships, for example, may not be able to travel. Because this is a devolved issue, the right of women to control their own bodies is yet another casualty of the collapse of power-sharing. Northern Ireland’s politicians must find a way to work together again. When they do, overturning this cruel ban must be a priority.

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Quartz: The urban farming ‘revolution’ has a fatal flaw

They focused on New York City, where CEA has dramatically increased in the last decade. Looking at 10 farms that produce roof- and indoor-grown vegetables at commercial scales, they investigated how much food the farms are producing, who it’s reaching, and how much space is available to expand CEA into.

They found that the biggest of these 10 commercial farms is around a third of an acre in size. Most are on roofs spread across New York City, and some are inside buildings and shipping containers. Mainly, these farms are producing impressive amounts of leafy greens such as lettuce, and herbs; some also produce fish. [...]

Furthermore, the predominantly grown foods—such as lettuce—aren’t of great nutritional value for the urban population, especially those threatened by food insecurity. Most produce from CEAs is sold at a premium, something that partly reflects the cost of the real estate used to grow the food. Consequently, that produce is typically grown for high-end food stores and restaurants, meaning it’s unlikely to reach low-income urban populations who need it most.

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Vox: The real reason streetcars are making a comeback (Aug 9, 2017)

 Starting in the late 20th century, modern streetcar proposals started rippling across municipalities in the United States. They’re touted as infrastructure carrying benefits ranging from the social to economic and the environmental. But these projects often make appearances in the news as costly, blunder-filled experiments in public policy.

Cities are willing to bet big on this technology for its potential to develop the local economy. But there is some disagreement as to whether the streetcar is driving this progress, or if it is simply the result of planning *around* the streetcar.

CityLab: What Cities Are Getting Wrong About Public Transportation

If you peruse this data-dump every year, you’ll probably notice something: Despite the tireless efforts of transit planners, bike-lane boosters, and other actors in the mobility arena, the mode-share percentages don’t seem to budge much in the any given growing city as they add more people, despite massive investments in transit infrastructure. Take Dallas, Texas, for example: In 1996, that city opened the first stage of its light-rail network, which has since grown into the largest system in the U.S., at a total cost of something around $5 billion. But the share of commuters in the city who ride transit has remained below 6 percent since 1990. [...]

A weighted-index does not quite get at why only 30 percent of Seattleites took sustainable transportation in 2015 when 91 percent of its jobs are within 10 minutes of what the report considers “frequent service,” where any stop is serviced an average of 5 times an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. But there’s a mismatch in accessibility: Only 10 percent of Seattle residents were reachable within 60 minutes by walking, biking, or public transit. Even the city’s successful rapid-transit options only reach 7 percent of its population. [...]

But making progress on these indicators does not necessarily mean having to overhaul your public transit options or build new systems from scratch. Consider Minneapolis and its progress on biking. If you factor in improvements in bike infrastructure, the population living near frequent transit jumps 9 percent, rising from 64 to 73 percent. “We only included protected bike lanes as a way to travel by bike in the transportation network,” says Chestnut. “It goes to show that number of people who have access to frequent transit can be improved without having to put in vast sums of money.”[...]

Another avenue where each city has room for improvement is with providing better transit service to people living in low-income households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Los Angeles may not reach as much large of a share of its total population with frequent transit in its car-centric sprawl, but where it does reach matters to a larger share of low-income households that rely on it compared to say, Atlanta. The indicators make that task appear not as difficult as you might think: Transit networks do reach where low-income people live; it is just that service needs to be more reliable.

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Vox: New York’s Orthodox Jewish community is battling measles outbreaks. Vaccine deniers are to blame.

What’s notable here is that the cases are mostly occurring among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated Orthodox Jews, particularly children. When asked why people are opting out of vaccines, the city health department said anti-vaccine propagandists are distributing misinformation in the community.

The fearmongerers include the Brooklyn group called PEACH — or Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health — which spreads misinformation about vaccine safety, citing rabbis as authorities, through a hotline and magazines. Brooklyn Orthodox Rabbi William Handler has also been proclaiming the well-debunked link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Parents who “placate the gods of vaccination” are engaging in “child sacrifice,” he told Vox. [...]

He also explained that some Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn go to school together, worship together, and live and travel together. This means a few unvaccinated people living in close proximity can be dangerous. But it also means making inroads with public health messages requires extra effort. “We see government invest in public health awareness a lot,” Rapaport said. “But it never trickles down to Yiddish speakers or people who don’t own TV sets.”

The story in New York is familiar: Other tight-knit communities — like the Somali-American community in Minnesota and the Amish in Ohio — have recently fallen victim to measles outbreaks as a result of vaccine refusal. This latest outbreak is a reminder of how vulnerable more insular groups can be to anti-vaxxers, and the unique challenges for public health advocates in countering their messages in these communities. [...]

“From a religious point of view, people have to vaccinate,” Rabbi David Niederman, executive director and president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told me. Instead, people have a duty to protect their families and the most vulnerable in their communities. “Anything that causes harm — you have to do whatever you can to [avoid] that.”

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The Atlantic: America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches

Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—between 6,000 and 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow. Though more than 70 percent of our citizens still claim to be Christian, congregational participation is less central to many American’s faith than it once was. Most denominations are declining as a share of the overall population, and donations to congregations have been falling for decades. Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated Americans, nicknamed the “nones,” are growing as a share of the U.S. population.

Any minister can tell you that the two best predictors of a congregation’s survival are “budgets and butts,” and American churches are struggling by both metrics. As donations and attendance decrease, the cost of maintaining large physical structures that are only in use a few hours a week by a handful of worshippers becomes prohibitive. None of these trends show signs of slowing, so the United States’s struggling congregations face a choice: start packing or find a creative way to stay afloat.[...]

A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories. Even for those who do not regularly practice a religion, sacred images and structures operate as powerful community symbols. When a hallowed building is resurrected as something else, those who feel a connection to that symbol may experience a sense of loss or even righteous anger. [...]

While this type of sacred-to-secular conversion may be a tough pill for former members to swallow, many are even less satisfied with the alternatives. A large number of abandoned churches have become wineries or breweries or bars. Others have been converted into hotels, bed and breakfasts, and AirBNBs. A few have been transformed into entertainment venues, such as an indoor playground for children, a laser-tag arena, or a skate park.

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CityLab: Mapping the Edison Bulbs of Brooklyn

But culture also plays a role in lighting appreciation. In China, dim incandescent lighting is still associated by older people with the poverty and hardships of the recent past. A bright home was a mark of wealth through much of Chinese history, while demons like the nian were believed to lurk in dark corners—to be flushed out with lanterns and fireworks at Lunar New Year. Illumination was thus both a prophylactic against evil and a status symbol, which explains why brilliantly lighted shops and restaurants—even upscale ones—are still common in China. Most Westerners (and younger Chinese, less beholden to tradition and with little memory of Mao-era privation) expect low dim light in a fashionable restaurant—light that evokes the ambience of a candle-lit dinner. It is no coincidence that Edison bulbs deliver a color temperature almost identical to the flattering light of a candle flame.

The Edison bulb revival began quietly in the 1980s, when entrepreneur Bob Rosenzweig began manufacturing reproductions for collectors. Sales were thin for years, until CFLs began replacing incandescent bulbs on store shelves. By the mid-aughts, Rosenzweig's products were all the rage with restaurant designers in New York. Then came the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, which unintentionally kicked the Edison revival into overdrive. Its new standards for energy consumption effectively banned most “general service” incandescent light bulbs, which became illegal to manufacture or import after 2014. But there were exceptions—bug lights, black lights, three-way bulbs and “decoratives” such as Edison bulbs. [...]

Just how accurate a marker of affluence and gentrification are Edison light bulbs? Very, it would seem. I recently walked most of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue at twilight looking for the bulbs. The borough’s original Main Street, Flatbush makes a 10-mile plunge from downtown Brooklyn to Floyd Bennett Field—Gotham’s failed first municipal airport. Much of the route is an unspoken boundary of sorts between majority-black neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and East Flatbush to the east, and the mostly-white enclaves of Park Slope, Ditmas Park, Midwood, and Marine Park to the west. That line has blurred in recent decades, as creative-class elites moved east to reclaim white neighborhoods—Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Park South—that emptied after World War II.

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VICE: The Horrific Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is About to Get a Lot Worse

So what's different about this, than any of those I just mentioned, is that there was really no effort in any of those evolutions to do anything but prosecute predator priests. For example, law enforcement had Mahony in their sights—they could have indicted him. And Steve Cooley, who was the district attorney in Los Angeles County at the time, didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it because the Church—the hierarchy of the Church—still had a significant amount of influence. What's happened, as time has gone on, is the individuals who hold elected office have had less and less exposure to a Church that's had the sort of political power it did 30 years ago. The Church, now, simply has less political influence now, and can't stop it.

Frankly, if you're the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and you begin getting these calls, and you see the scope of this, why wouldn't you investigate it? It's criminality, really, on a scale that's unheard of. In California, the Church paid $1 billion to settle cases in the mid 2000s. A diocese went bankrupt. And it's not just the number of perpetrators. The real criminal conspiracy, and the real criminality, is the effort to cover it up, and conceal it as a matter of policy and practice. I think a lot of people still want to believe that something like what happened in Pennsylvania is an anomaly. It's not. It's the norm. Every diocese is the same—and the reason for that is the Church is a hierarchal organization, managed from the top-down.  [...]

I think the next step—and I do think it's going to happen—is a federal investigation. Catholic institutions are not only religious, but they're massive receivers of federal, state, and local financial aid through charity and other organizations. And, more than anything else, they're a tax-exempt organization. If Scientology, which is tiny sect, [eventually loses] its tax-empt status because of criminality, then isn't a fair discussion to have that for the Catholic Church [too]? Can you imagine, say, if you found out that 300 United Airlines flight attendants were molesting children, what would happen to United Airlines? And we don't have 300—[we have even more] priests who have been removed for this behavior since the early 2000s. The only reason they haven't been held to the same standard that everyone else has been is the religious works in front of them. [...]

Me too. So the difference between Catholicism and basically any other Protestant sect is that the only way to salvation in the Church is through the sacramental life. And the only way to participate fully in the sacramental life is to go through all seven sacraments, one of them being to become a priest. And the victims that priests typically target are almost always the most devout kids who truly in their heart believe.

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CityLab: Where New York Is Gentrifying and Where It Isn't (MAY 12, 2016)

The map below shows the location of the three types of neighborhoods across the city. The gentrifying neighborhoods (shown in dark blue) are mainly located in upper Manhattan near Harlem and across parts of Brooklyn, especially in areas adjacent to Lower Manhattan. Note the non-gentrifying neighborhoods (shown in light blue) next to many of the gentrifying neighborhoods, which reflects the juxtaposition of concentrated advantage and disadvantage in New York City today. [...]

Gentrification in New York City is the outcome of a series of economic and demographic trends that have transformed the city more broadly—notably, the surge in more educated, affluent, younger, and single people headed back to the city. In recent decades, gentrifying neighborhoods have seen substantial gains in income. Average household incomes rose by 7.3 percent in the 1990s and 6.1 percent from 2000 to 2010-2014 in these neighborhoods. Across the city, average household incomes grew slightly in the 1990s, but declined after the year 2000. [...]

Unsurprisingly, gentrifying neighborhoods have seen a significant racial transformation, losing large numbers of black residents while gaining a substantial white population. In New York, the share of white residents in gentrifying neighborhoods increased from 18.8 percent in 1990 to 20.6 percent in 2010, while the share of black residents fell from 37.9 percent in 1990 to 30.9 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of Asian and Hispanic residents in gentrifying neighborhoods grew slightly, compared to much faster growth citywide. Like many cities, New York’s overall shares of black and white residents have declined since 1990, while its shares of Asian and Hispanic residents have increased.

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Quartz: The LGBT political glass ceiling is cracking wide open

It was only in 2009 that Iceland’s Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was elected, becoming the first openly LGBT person in the world to serve as a prime minister. In 2011, Belgium’s Elio Di Rupo became prime minister. In 2013, in neighboring Luxembourg, Xavier Bettle was voted prime minister—a position he still holds. He has since been joined by two additional LGBT leaders: Serbia’s Ana Brnabić, and Leo Varadkar of Ireland, a country that only decriminalized same-sex relations in 1993. [...]

Today, at city, regional and national levels, several thousand openly LGBT politicians have entered the scene—a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. The 2017 elections in the US, for instance, saw important successes for LGBT candidates around America—primarily, but not exclusively, within progressive voters. The number of American LGBT mayors is up to 23—one of them, Peter Buttigieg, is a rising democratic star serving in conservative South Bend, Indiana who came out on the pages of his local paper while in office. Last weekend he married his partner as his town celebrated Pride with the rest of America. In the same year, in the UK, 35 LGBT representatives were voted into parliament (on both sides of the aisle). [...]

Despite the relative diversity of New York City’s political scene, Johnson rejects the idea that being an LGBT representative shouldn’t matter. “Being gay is not like having blue eyes,” he says. He considers his sexual orientation an integral part of his identity—the way he lives, who he loves—and says it will always be associated with his political persona. [...]

In addition to representation, it’s also important that LGBT candidates aren’t reduced to just LGBT issues. This is a stance Ohana clearly embraces, as a member of the hawkish, right-wing Likud party. Back when he first joined Likud, many members “thought I was the first gay [person] they had ever met,” he says. Yet for them, as well as the larger Israeli society, “when they see me, ‘gay’ isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, but my actions and views.”

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Jacobin Magazine: The Torture of Solitary

In recent years, city officials have introduced a series of reforms intended to reduce overcrowding and curtail abuse, including the provision of therapeutic programs for prisoners and a ban on the use of solitary confinement on sixteen- and seventeen-year-old prisoners. This week, the city reached a deal with the US Justice Department that includes adding thousands of new surveillance cameras to the prison and developing a computer system to track use-of-force incidences. [...]

A 2013 report from the Government Accounting Office found that the federal system holds about 7.1% of its 217,000 prisoners in some form of solitary confinement, and “from fiscal year 2008 through February 2013, the total inmate population in segregated housing units increased approximately 17% — from 10,659 to 12,460 inmates.” [...]

More recent studies have been similarly arresting. One looking at California’s prison system discovered that almost half of all suicides were prisoners in solitary confinement. Another examining the federal prison system “found that 63 percent of suicides occurred among inmates locked in ‘special housing status,’ such as solitary or in psychiatric seclusion cells.” [...]

Most of the available data regarding the mental and physical health repercussions of solitary confinement corroborate Gassian’s conclusions. In some cases, the effect of this isolation on people’s mental health is irreversible, persisting even after they’ve been released. Often those prisoners are juveniles, many whom are already at risk of developing mental health issues stemming from things like poverty and abuse.

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Quartzy: Plastic straws are the new plastic bags

Long a default offering in restaurants and takeout joints, plastic straws have of late become antennae for the ire of environmentalists, like plastic bags before them. And rightfully so. The Ocean Conservancy’s 2017 International Coastal Cleanup Report (pdf), which contains data from cleanup efforts in 112 countries, found plastic straws to be consistently in the top 10 discarded items, contributing to some 18 million pounds (8 million kg) of ocean trash collected. If the data alone doesn’t inspire you to give up straws, an excruciating story and video of a sea turtle with a four-inch (10 cm) straw stuck in its nostril might. [...]

Like the plastic bag, the straw is swiftly becoming a symbol for the toxic and persistent scourge of single-use plastic, and an everyday item that can be eliminated to reduce its use. Organizations such as the Surfrider Foundation, the Plastic Pollution Coalition, and the Ocean Conservancy are all campaigning to get concerned citizens—and the restaurants that serve them—to skip plastic straws entirely.  

Some companies and municipalities are taking note. On Monday (May 21), Alaska Airlines announced it would replace plastic stir straws and citrus picks with “sustainable, marine-friendly alternatives” on all its flights and in lounges. (Fun fact: This change came after the urging of a 16-year-old Girl Scout named Shelby O’Neil.) A day later, New York City councilman Rafael L. Espinal Jr. introduced a bill to outlaw plastic straws in the city’s restaurants.

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