“It’s one thing to hand out the food, but it’s another to share a meal” — Millions of people around the world are sheltering in place to help stem the spread of Covid-19. But in the empty city streets some of society’s most vulnerable continue to gather outside the dwindling number of soup kitchens still serving meals. Frontline organizations feeding the hungry have been hit hard…

Milk dispensers cut down on packaging and food waste. Why doesn’t your school use them? — It’s almost lunchtime at Columbia Valley Elementary. The counter’s rollup window is opened and workers are rushing around getting hamburgers ready, laying out sides, steeling themselves for the coming students. Makayla and Scott are leading a tour through the cafeteria of some recent sustainability improvements that their school’s Green Team…

A socioeconomic experiment in inclusive growth offers an inexpensive, no-risk path to building personal assets and community capital. After a successful first year project organizers are looking to test their model in new cities across the country. — It takes an hour and a half — two trains and a mile on foot — to get from my house to Plaza 122, two buildings of offices and a few storefronts squaring off across a central parking lot. You can get your hair done, if you read Cyrillic you…

Book burning and other forms of cultural suppression — When things get dark the first people rounded up and put up against the wall are the artists, the intellectuals, the writers. But then you look at the millions and millions of people who kept their heads down and did nothing and they were also killed. So if you have…

Addressing consumer desire, skewed perceptions and our perversion of the natural world — The perfectly manicured rainbow of flowers in your backyard is not nature. The apples you eat did not grow so sweet and so juicy on their own. Botanists have spent generations carefully cross-breeding fruits, vegetables and ornamental plants to be desirable commodities. Jason DeMarte was shooting landscapes inside a natural…

Virtual installations of hellish landscapes, social isolation and the willful destruction of culture pull players into the trans experience — It’s a bedroom bunker safe from the geopolitical horror show outside. An asteroid is onscreen, twisting at the touch of an iridescent planetoid trackball, everything powered by the guts of a CPU gurgling mineral oil inside an aquarium. Junk food trash and cigarette butts have been scraped from the floor…

Multimedia artist Tya Alisa Anthony deconstructs colorism by remixing black media — America is a much more colorful place than it used to be, but that hasn’t always been reflected in magazines, movies or on TV. It’s taken a long time, but the fight for diversity and representation in the media has finally grown so fierce that studio executives and publishers can’t…

Immigrant families worked punishing hours in dilapidated apartments just to survive — By 1900, the majority of New Yorkers — some 2.3 million people — lived in tenement apartments. The tenements were single-family buildings that had been cheaply converted to tiny multi-family units, intended to house the maximum number of people possible — mostly immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who were…

Students traveled Australia by bus, just like the Freedom Riders — A mob surrounded them, shouting and jeering. They hurled insults, then spit, food, and rocks. Punches were thrown. The mayor ordered the protesters removed and police escorted them back to their bus, then out of town. It was an ugly and terrifying confrontation, but also a terrific success. They had…