Harold Pollack

Yesterday in Sweden, a 20-year-old teaching assistant named Lavin Eskandar was stabbed to death while he was protecting children from a deranged sword-wielding assailant who was attacking the school where Eskandar worked. One other person was killed before police intervened. A conspicuous number of teachers, professors, and school workers have put their lives on the […]

(The real Harold) Meyerson has a beautiful piece up at the American Prospect (How the Bronx came back (but didn’t bring everyone along)), which describes the uneven, delayed, and incomplete, yet nonetheless impressive economic resurgence of the Bronx. Now York’s most challenged borough has seen some striking gains, not least a jaw-dropping decline in homicides, […]

My friend Jesse Singal has a nice piece over at the Science of Us about Michael Javen Fortner’s new book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment. “Key to this story,” Jesse notes, “is the role of Harlem’s residents in forcefully advocating for a tougher, more punitive approach to the neighborhood’s ‘pushers’ and […]

As if the VW scandal weren’t bad enough, German car makers are being rocked by a second indignity, the intrusion of Lexus into BMW’s home turf: the obnoxious one-percenter. Yes these are the two best parking spaces at the gym It’s easy to see why BMW was complacent. Not long ago, I was honked at […]

L’shanah tovah everyone. These graphs show some pretty impressive progress. The most recent national vital statistics mortality data shows remarkable continued progress in overall age-adjusted mortality rates, alongside impressive narrowing of both black-white and male-female gaps in life expectancy. Moreover, I suspect progress will continue in the more recent data, given impressive data on health system […]

It’s been obvious for a while now that the Black Lives Matter movement would benefit from a concrete policy agenda around which it could focus its organizing, public protest, and practical negotiations with public officials. Developing such an agenda is no easy task — especially for a grassroots movement that basically came into existence a […]

I wrote an op-ed in Thursday’s Chicago’s Sun Times about the impact of Illinois’s budget crisis on services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. A gentleman with initials “J.K.” read it, and sent me the below email. JK’s email My wife Veronica happened to see it, and composed the below response, which I am […]

My forger former grad-school TA and current Century Foundation colleague Paul Jargowsky just released a beautifully-produced web-report called “Architecture of Segregation: Civil unrest, the concentration of poverty, and public policy.” Paul is a national leader at understanding the geography of American poverty. It’s a pretty sobering report. The below figure illustrates one reason why. If you wonder […]

My conversation with University of Michigan Law Professor Sam Bagenstos. From 2009 to 2011, he was a political appointee in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, where he headed Obama administration’s disability enforcement efforts. We had a great conversation about the often-unsung heroes […]

The Atlantic allowed me to write a short response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, Between the World and Me. I’m not qualified to evaluate the book’s literary merit, let alone to engage celebrity-gossip regarding Coates’ rank in the pantheon of African-American public intellectuals. I read this book for my own reasons, as one of many researchers who […]