As a Social Journalism student at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve focused on communities that, in different yet universal ways, are being taken advantage of by big corporations and their local governments. I engaged a community in Charlestown, Indiana, where the mayor was trying to kick out…

I have always been scared of dying young. If I were to get news that I had terminal cancer, the dominant emotion I would feel would be pissed. Pissed at the hand I was dealt. Pissed that I would even have to contemplate my life ending. I wouldn’t make it…

In order for oil and gas projects get approved, they first have to be voted on by city councils or reviewed by government agencies. But what happens the people in those agencies are bribed by the very company they’re reviewing? …

The entire purpose of land use planning should be to protect residents from industry. It’s to have a place to put, say, a factory that wants to come in, that’s separate from a residential neighborhood. But what happens when a government decides it wants to replace residents with industry instead…

Why Census data is too flawed a way to account for compressor stations’ impact on minority communities — Compressor stations, or large, industrial gas-fired turbines that exist every couple hundred miles along a pipeline route, release toxic chemicals that increase health risks for the individuals that live near them. …

*Applies to any member of the LGBTQ spectrum, but that doesn’t rhyme, does it I was on my way to a gay club with a few friends when we passed a Midtown Chick-fil-A. “Chick-fil-A!”, one of them exclaimed. “I know they hate gay people, but their chicken sandwiches are so…

JFK didn’t randomly decide to land the first man on the moon. His announcement that we’d be the ones to do it by the end of the decade came on the heels of fifteen years of escalating competition with the Soviets. They were grilling us in the space race and…

This is Colin Jost talking about the Amazon HQ2 announcement two weeks ago on SNL’s Weekend Update: “By the way, only New Yorkers could complain about getting 25,000 new jobs. All the cities who lost out must be like, ‘shut up you whiney bitches’. New York basically won the lottery…

I love country music. And in the country music community, Hank Williams is widely considered to be the father of the genre. There’s just one little explosive qualifier to this belief. Hank Williams learned everything he knew about music from a black man in his town named Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne…