• “We Were Never Meant to Survive,” a Response to Charleston.
• Take Down the Confederate Flag – Now.
• A Migrant’s Journey, from Syria to Sweden.
• Is Africa Really Rising?
• That Time the Middle East Exploded – and Nixon was Drunk.
• The Post-Ownership Society.
• The Agency, a crazy look at a Russian internet trolling agency.
• How American Cities ‘Disconnect’ Youth:

While disconnection rates vary from city to city, some of the biggest chasms are found between predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods—neighborhoods within the same metro area. In Chicago, for example—a city simultaneously known for its gang violence and its prestigious art museums— only 8 percent of the city’s white youth are disconnected, compared to roughly a quarter of its black youth. Youth and young adults aged 16 to 24 in Chicago who live in mostly black neighborhoods, as well as their counterparts in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, are ten times more likely to be disconnected than their peers living in majority-white neighborhoods in the very same cities.

The cities with high black-disconnection rates also have deeply segregated school systems. Less than 10 percent of kids enrolled in Chicago Public Schools are white, and the statistics are similar in D.C.(12 percent) and Philadelphia (14 percent). Unsurprisingly, the report parallels similar phenomena in school systems that, despite the six-decade-old Brown v. Board of Education decision,remain segregated to this day—often a byproduct of housing policies and trends.

• Chronicling Los Angeles’ History, Menu by Menu.
• Don’t Let the Police Teach Your Kid a Lesson.
• U.N. Peacekeeping and Transactional Sex.
• Dreams Deferred in Baltimore.
• Why Teachers are Fleeing Arizona in Droves.
• Why Does Reddit Love to Hate?
• Two pieces on the Dominican Republic’s expulsion of Haitians.
• How Section 8 Became a Slur:

Most of these early projects were built for whites, and whites of a particular kind: the “barely poor,” as Vale puts it — the upwardly mobile working class, with fathers working in factory jobs. Housing agencies required tenant families to have stable work and married parents. Children out of wedlock were rejected. Housing authority managers visited prospective tenants, often unannounced, to check on the cleanliness of their homes and their housekeeping habits.

“The idea — although people didn’t tend to voice it explicitly — was that you could be too poor for public housing,” Vale says. In many cities, the truly poor remained in the tenements.

[…]

By the 1960s, the tenants living in public housing began to grow more deeply poor and, particularly in big cities, much less white, in large part thanks to another set of active housing policies pushed next by the federal government.

In cities like Chicago and Detroit, public housing “became a black program,” says the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein, “because the Federal Housing Administration created a different program for whites, which was a single-family suburban program.”