United States
I've been a lot of things in life: A gothic fashion model (it's ok to laugh), a federal investigator, a cat nanny. But through it all, I've been a writer.
Over the last 12 years, my work has appeared in more than 100 magazines, websites, and newspapers including The New York Times, The Huffington Post,
and USA Today.
Driven by boundless curiosity and impeccable research chops, I explore the intersections of identity, culture, healthcare, technology, and policy.
When I'm not working, you can find me testing the latest biometric gadget, powerlifting, exploring some remote corner of the world (most recently, the Republic of Georgia), or making viral memes on Reddit that have been featured in Vice, the UK's Sun Tabloid, and Bored Panda.
Emergency room visits are expensive, time-consuming, and, during a pandemic, potentially deadly. These risks are magnified for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), a patient cohort that has more emergency room visits than any other.
Throughout 2020, a year overshadowed by a deadly pandemic that has exacerbated structural white supremacy, anti-Black police brutality was met with mass uprisings supporting Black lives.
As a boy growing up in Columbus, OH, every spring my mom would enlist me to haul boxes of our belongings out t...
Re " Who's Able-Bodied Anyway? " (The Upshot, Sunday Review, Feb. 4): The number of "able" people living in poverty represents a crisis - a crisis of opportunity. Indeed, America's able poor are not lazy.
Whether you're new to marketing or an industry veteran, SkillUp's Marketing Professional assessment lets you know where you stand in today's digital marketing landscape. During our free, one hour assessment, you'll put your skills to the test by solving...
This is "2018 Ready, Willing & Able Graduation - Valedictorian Craig Twiggs" by The Doe Fund on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people...
protesting unused vacant property (via @pthny) In New York City, the demand for affordable housing far exceeds supply. Seventy percent of the city's homeless shelter residents are families. Families who should be in homes.
The day began like so many others. I was standing in my apartment, drinking coffee and watching the news. My past - which was filled with horrible decisions that had led to drug use and multiple attempted robberies - weighed heavily on my mind.
In an era of accelerating climate change and deadly environmental crises that impact people from Guangzhou to Alberta, "sustainability" has become a global catchphrase. Touted by myriad businesses and institutions, it evokes images of clean air, abundant forests and a future in which we can all prosper on a thriving planet.
Have you ever been in a serious accident? If not, try to imagine that you're riding in a car. You're cruising smoothly on the freeway despite the rainy weather, when suddenly the tires no longer grip the road.
Native Americans challenge their invisibility in society.
According to a February 2016 study in the Journal of Medical Occupational Safety, replacing standard needles with safety needles could reduce the risk of HIV and other bloodborne pathogens in healthcare workers by 96 percent. If Bill 1400 passes, Maryland will join 19 other states in mandating that outdated standard needles be replaced by safety needles in the state’s 1,011 hospitals and clinics. The measure, proposed by Del. Dan K. Morhaim, a Baltimore County Democrat and emergency room...
At six feet tall and sporting more than 100 tattoos, some might describe Leaf Chang as intimidating. But upon stepping into his Bushwick shop, Gnostic Tattoo, he upends that notion with a broad smile and disarming Southern accent. It’s an incongruous mix that reflects the cultural flux of the surrounding neighborhood.
In the eighties, Cyndi Lauper declared that “girls just wanna have fun.” So went the motto for mallrats with hair as big as the era’s appetite for consumption. Then, in the nineties, pop icons from the Spice Girls to Hole professed “girl power,” rallying young women behind role models who sometimes turned out to be more “Clueless” than prophetic. But for the new generation of twentysomething women glued to their smart phones and addicted to social media, the unspoken anthem is simply: “See...
I entered Harlem Middle School in Fall 1994 with a mouthful of braces, an overflowing training bra and a lingering attachment to Velcro shoes. I had no idea who Kriss Kross were, but I could recite facts from the Encyclopedia Britannica and The American Medical Association's Family Medical Guide on command (and often without the explicit consent of my listener).
Hollywood would have you believe that American Indians are a pretty humorless lot. Stoic, tragic, fierce, mystical, romantic? Sure. But funny? Somehow the notion never caught on and yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Original Scholarship
Over the last three centuries, the people of Robeson County, North Carolina, have been called many things: outlaws, a “mix’t crewe,” Cherokee, Croatan, Tuscarora, Cheraw, Siouan, Lumbee and, most recently, "wannabe." In 1936, anthropologist Carl Seltzer was sent by the U.S. government to assess the claims of indigeneity of this group who would later identify as “Lumbee” on account of their long-standing proximity to the Lumber River. By documenting their phenotypic characteristics, he...
Ten years ago, on a warm summer day in Ottawa, Canada’s newly minted Prime Minister Steven Harper laid out his neoliberal vision for the Canadian economy and declared the nation to be an “emerging energy superpower." At that time, the war in Iraq was only 3 years old, oil prices were $68 a barrel and rising and Canada was riding high on the early years of a “bitumen boom” in its western province of Alberta. It was difficult to challenge Harper’s declaration given that, in 2006 alone, Canada...
On June 15, 2010, the sound of drumming and the joyous peels of a victory song echoed through the coastal forests of eastern Long Island in New York State, celebrating the end of the Shinnecock Indian Nation's 32-year battle for federal recognition (Hakim 2010).