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‘Evicted Over $49: What Happens When Seattle’s Poorest Tenants Can’t Make Rent‘ (Heidi Groover for The Stranger)
Public housing is supposed to provide opportunity and offer a chance to stabilize your life. So why are people being evicted for trivial sums in Seattle?
Last fall, SHA filed a case against a 20-year-old mother of two who the agency said was behind on rent by $255. SHA sought more than $1,400, including $444 in back rent, $350 in attorney fees, and a $133 sheriff’s fee. When the woman wrote to the court asking the court to dismiss the judgment, she said she missed her court date because she was on medications for the flu and bronchitis and was disoriented. Two months later, SHA agreed to allow her to stay. By that time, she owed a total of $2,761. A nonprofit helped her pay.
‘A Lynching’s Long Shadow‘ (Vanessa Gregory for the New York Times)
Lynchings are a gruesome legacy in the United States, and one that often goes undiscussed — yet it’s difficult to confront white supremacy without openly confronting one of its most ugly manifestations.
The gruesome nature of lynchings, Ifill noted, was the main point; they were meant to haunt and intimidate, and to thus ensure the continuation of white supremacy. Stevenson makes a point of calling them “racial terror lynchings.” The killings rippled beyond individual victims and their families to shroud entire communities in fear and shame. In some places, lynching memories suppressed black voter participation for decades. Even today, Ifill and Stevenson said, memories of racial violence can be so traumatic that survivors, witnesses and inheritors stay locked in silence — much like Higginbottom’s mother, who took her husband’s memory to her grave. “There are thousands of African-American families with histories of horrific victimization and racial oppression that have never openly talked because it hasn’t felt safe or healthy to have those conversations,” Stevenson said. “We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.”
‘Out of Exile: Twenty-five years after her career-making album, Liz Phair is still writing songs first and foremost for herself.‘ (Emily Gould for The Cut)
This is a thoughtful, sensitive, intriguing profile of an artist who’s been in a very tough business for a very long time.
It might be that she’s currently — finally — just far enough above the fray to both see it clearly and make the kind of art she truly wants to, for the first time since the early days of her career. But that will come after the Guyville tour — five stops in intimate venues, a challenging prospect not only because she has to play songs she hasn’t played in years, some of which she’s never played in public at all, but also because those songs are so similar in some instances to versions that made it onto her later albums. “I’m actually abjectly terrified to be up there and have like a brain short-circuit.” But it’s exciting to know that she’ll be playing to some of her most devoted fans, as well as some new acolytes.
‘The unique way the Dutch treat mentally ill prisoners‘ (Melissa Hogenboom for BBC News)
In the Netherlands, police are taking an interesting approach to handling mentally ill inmates and prisoners, one rooted in compassion and helping them access care. Is it working? Should other countries follow suit?
One of the unique things about the Dutch criminal justice system is that a person can be judged to be responsible for their crime on five levels. “Dutch law differs from English law in that it recognises a sliding scale from full responsibility through to total lack of responsibility, with three levels in between,” explains one report in the journal Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health. While the diminished responsibility clause in the UK is similar, there is no such sliding scale.
‘Paulette Jordan Is Running For Governor. Who Will Follow Her?‘ (Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed)
2018 is a year of strange political stories in the United States, paired with hope, potential, and a drive for change. This woman is trying to be the first Native American governor in the United States, and she’s doing it in an extremely conservative state. What are the odds for her unlikely campaign?
Jordan has caught the national eye as a Native woman, and a progressive at that, who is vying to make history in a conservative state. In Idaho, however, she’s marketed herself as an independent, straight-talking, ranch-raised woman, in touch with the needs of people outside of urban areas and willing to work across the aisle to find solutions that work. But ahead of the May 15 primary, she still needs to persuade Idaho Democrats — many of whom remain convinced of their party’s impotency and irrelevance across the state — that the person they choose to run in a long-shot race against Republicans actually matters.
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Photo: Filmfestival Linz/Creative Commons