Isabeau Dasho is the Assistant director of the Harris Writing Workshop and new mom.Co-authored by Megan Sanders.Recently I attended the “Death: Life’s Greatest Mystery” exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum. It was deft, approachable, and well handled. The curat... More »
Six months after a gunman legally purchased a semiautomatic rifle and killed seven people in Highland Park, a northern Chicago suburb, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Protect Illinois Communities Act into law, banning the sale and delivery of assaul... More »
If every square block of abandoned land in American cities were placed side-by-side, the area would be larger than the state of Maryland. In fact, nearly 15 percent of all urban land is either vacant or barren. This limits the economic vitality of communities ... More »
Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) was launched by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2002 to reduce gun violence across 94 federal districts. The City of Chicago adopted this program the same year, targeting neighborhoods inflicted with high rates of poverty, un... More »
As gun violence takes hundreds of lives each year in Chicago, academics, journalists and policy makers continue to debate the merits of viewing gun violence as a public health issue. While organizations like the American Public Health Association advocate in f... More »
Every time a trigger is pulled in Minneapolis, the creation of 80 potential jobs is blocked. While the traumatizing effects of gun violence have been studied extensively, its impact on economic activity has remained largely unexplored. A recent Urban Institute... More »
The University of Chicago Crime Lab released a report in January 2017 that details the sudden spike in gun violence that persisted throughout 2016. The Crime Lab analyzed key data in an attempt to discover what triggered the dramatic increase in gun-related cr... More »
Over the past few years, mass shootings have become more frequent, and especially with the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, CA, guns seem to have come to the fore. To what do you attribute this uptick in particularly public mass shootings and other ty... More »
A harsh childhood can lead to a life strategy that condones violence in response to status threats. An economic game shows that such a worldview is linked to heightened envy in unfair situations. More »
Political strategist and former New York City Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson discusses how terrorism, technology, and crime have impacted views on privacy and security. More »
Newt Gingrich on what he learned from the campaign trail, what to expect from Republicans over the next few years, and what he would do if he were Speaker of the House today. More »