We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s, Klaus Jacob observed. But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a...
Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
In the end, a source of deep meaning and security, but because it allows us the freedom to cultivate our selves, develop original ideas, and make a productive return to the world.
Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone.
Living in a place like East New York requires developing coping strategies, and for many residents, the more vulnerable older and younger ones in particular, the key is to find safe havens. As on ever...
The disaster also has a social etiology, which no meteorological study, medical autopsy, or epidemiological report can uncover. The human dimensions of the catastrophe remain unexplored. This book is...
The boys were already dead, though, and when the paramedics arrived, they determined that the body temperatures were 107 and 108 degrees.
The 1995 heat wave was a social drama that played out and made visible a series of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Investigating the people, places, and institutions most...
Spaces, places (like cafés, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they’ve purchased. Entrepreneurs typically start these kinds of bu...
More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbala...
They determined that the death count based solely on the medical autopsies had underestimated the damage. Between 14 and 20 July, 739 more Chicago residents died than in a typical week for that month....
In one major U.S. city, The New York Times reports, unclaimed bodies are piling up faster than the city can handle them; boxes containing the personal papers of the deceased are piled floor to ceiling...
It’s like an assembly line in there, one officer said. In many cases police delivered decomposed bodies to the morgue several days after the date of death because no one had noticed that the person ha...
Do you know why so many of us live alone? a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: Because we can.
Cities and suburbs to the opportunities we have to casually interact with strangers, friends, and neighbors. It is especially important for children, the elderly, and other people whose limited mobili...
The dead bodies were so visible that almost no one could see what had happened to them.
Quite often happens that a phenomenon is insignificant only because one fails to take it into account.4 The missing dimension in our current understanding of the heat wave stems precisely from this ki...