Social Justice Issues

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful in November. An industry that often celebrates pushing through the pain is turning its focus to...

Three Portland high school students are reinventing sex ed    {A shorter version of this story appeared in the September issue of Portland Monthly .} When 18-year-old twins Milena and Sofia Ben-Zaken and their friend Tess Waxman, also 18, were at Sunnyside Environmental School, their sex ed instruction was laughably brief. "We had one day on puberty in the 5th grade," Milena recalls. “We didn’t really have sex ed in 8th grade, either, except for on the 8th grade retreat,” Sof

Dr. Karin Selva, a pediatric endocrinologist at Legacy Emanuel’s Randall Children’s Hospital, saw her first transgendered patient in 2010. A 15-year-old who was born male, the patient suffered from Type 1 diabetes and depression. After seeing a counselor, the patient revealed she identified as female. “When I first met her she was sullen, reclusive, depressed, wouldn’t make eye contact, and had dropped out of school. She was a very sad individual,” says Selva. But after cou

Home economics, which was a fixture in secondary schools throughout the 1950s and 1960s, has all but vanished today, but there is a steady rallying cry from pediatricians, nutrition educators, and food justice activists to bring it back. Helen Zoe Veit, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State, recently wrote an impassioned Op-Ed in the New York Times in which she championed home ec and asked, “What if the government put the tools of obesity prevention in the hands

Like many Americans, I have a pre-existing condition. And as a freelancer who bought my own health insurance plan in New York City, it turns out I had it pretty good. As I reported this article for Portland Monthly , I discovered that New York is one of just a handful of states that's known as a "guaranteed issue" state: insurance companies in these states must cover residents who have pre-existing conditions, as long as they've had continuous coverage. To my dismay, in Ore

Freelancing can be rough, especially in this economy. But reporting stories like this one , which ran in the Metro section of the Times this past weekend, is what makes me love my job. For a year or more, I'd walked past Automotive High School in Williamsburg and wondered about the raggedy but lush vegetable garden bordering its majestic front. I always had another assignment or story idea to pursue, though, so never took the time to investigate. It wasn't until this fall, w