Texas and California offer two different visions of how to handle the coronavirus lockdowns and end them. Here’s an up-close look at the challenges – and the surprising similarities.
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Groups that facilitate civil discourse abound, post-2016 election. The challenge is learning to talk with your political opposite outside the structured settings of workshops and classrooms.
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Who deserves a home? To tackle homelessness, one city is rethinking that question. Houston has taken a “housing-first” approach in which a home is seen as a vital first step toward stability.
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Humans are innovators and tend to look to technology to solve problems. But increasingly, people are turning to the natural world for solutions as well. For Houston, that means reintroducing the prairie.
Read moreWhat does it mean to be a good coach? Is it winning games, molding young characters, or both? A small town in Texas considers after it hires a controversial coach.
Read moreAt the Monitor Breakfast, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz predicted Texas will be “hotly contested” in 2020, thanks to the growing clout of suburban voters – particularly women – who have been moving to the left, politically.
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When it comes to relics of hate, what is the best way forward? In Fort Worth, Texas, a group wants to use an old Ku Klux Klan hall to honor victims of racial violence and promote healing. Others say, tear it down.
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El Paso is an old city with a big heart, residents told our reporter. Its embrace of all isn’t going anywhere, they say, despite a terrorist attack aimed at its diversity.
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Over a 13-year career as a pediatrician in Texas, Dr. Marsha Griffin has visited every government facility that could hold newly arrived migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley. She sat down with the Monitor in early July to discuss what she has been seeing and how she thinks the government could be taking better care of the migrant children in its custody.
Read moreWho are the cultivators of contemplation in U.S. society? One of them is Naomi Shihab Nye, the latest young people’s poet laureate. She encourages slowing down as a way to see the extraordinary in every life.
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