Pandemic Financially Imperils Nearly Half Of American Households

Cynthia Maclin cannot get out of bed most days. Chronic lung disease leaves her short of breath and ended her 45-year career as a medical administrator. COVID-19 cases are on the rise in her hometown of Chicago, and Maclin has already lost eight friends and family members to the virus, […] Read more »

American Communities Experience Deaths of Despair at Uneven Rates

There’s a long list of measures that examine who is struggling in the United States — from poverty rates to income inequality — but in recent years a complicated set of personal struggles and challenges has come to be measured in one phrase, Deaths of Despair. This phrase describes deaths […] Read more »

Tracking The Pandemic In The Battleground: Wave 2

The Tea Party-Trump Republican Party was forced to lead the country’s response to the pandemic and that accelerated the polarization of the country and marginalization of the GOP — at a very high human cost. Donald Trump took leadership of a modern Republican Party shaped profoundly by the Tea Party […] Read more »

Essential, and No Longer Disposable

The greatest irony of the coronavirus pandemic may be that many of the American workers now considered the most essential were among those treated as the most disposable before the outbreak began. Meatpackers, farmworkers, grocery-store cashiers, warehouse clerks, janitors, nursing-home and home-health-care aides—all of these positions offer some of the […] Read more »