Feeling the portrait

A Service Horse

Monitoring Social Media

Being a teenager on the West Bank

A strange collection

Leaping to support male ballet dancers

A Good Summary

"Not dying is a very good thing"

Shall we dance?

Will this be us?

Would you believe a Massachusetts high school began in 1645?

That is not a typo. Roxbury Latin, a private school for boys in grades 7 - 12, was started in 1645 and will soon be celebrating its 375th birthday. It is not a big school, only 300 students and it has a student-teacher ratio of 7-1. 38% are "boys of color." 36% of the students receive financial aid, the average being almost $25,000 (tuition is $34,550). 85% of the faculty have advanced degrees; a third have been here for 15 years or more. 100% of the graduates go on to college; 47% receive National Merit Scholar recognition.

Two of my sons attended the school.

Doing something about drugs

Most of us would admit that the "War on Drugs" has failed. The number of opioid users has grown. More of us die each year from overdoses than perished in the Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq wars combined. Our prisons are overloaded. Drug addiction has ripped apart families and stunted children’s futures. More than two million children in America live with a parent suffering from an illicit-drug dependency.

Portugal tried a different approach than war. It has decriminalized the possession of all drugs. Its overdose deaths plunged. Drug mortality rates in the United States are now about 50 times higher than in Portugal.

Seattle is trying a similar approach. Anyone caught here with a small amount (one gram or less) of drugs — even heroin — isn’t typically prosecuted. Instead, that person is steered toward social services to get help. Dealers still get arrested, but not ordinary users.

The social service program is known as LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion). Instead of simply arresting drug users for narcotics or prostitution, police officers watch for those who are nonviolent and want help, and divert them to social service programs and intensive case management. LEAD isn’t cheap — it costs about $350 per month per participant to provide case managers. But it is cheaper than jail, courts and costs associated with homelessness. One peer-reviewed study found that drug users assigned to LEAD were 58 percent less likely to be rearrested, compared with a control group. Participants were also almost twice as likely to have housing as they had been before entering LEAD, and 46 percent more likely to be employed or getting job training.

It's working so well that it is becoming the consensus preference among public health experts in the U.S. and abroad.

More Olympic Competitors

We need to worry about water

United Students Achievers Program

About twenty years ago, the United Student Achievers Program was founded in Zimbabwe by an American, Rebecca Zeigler Mano, who married a native. The program identifies disadvantaged high school students of enormous promise and coaches them through applying to top-notch colleges outside of their country and steers them toward futures they never imagined.They provide students with the guidance necessary to apply to foreign colleges and also help with application fees and financial aid forms. Over 400 students have gone abroad to schools such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., the University of Chicago, Duke, Pomona. Many went on to earn Ph.D.s. Many became physicians. Six won Rhodes scholarships.

Where the money is

Analyzing the Amazon forest fires

A retirement home for pets

The heavier people of the 21st century

How do you top this?

Judy Collins, Stephen Sondheim, the Boston Pops with Arthur Fiedler