This article suggests some good ways to make a start, including some relevant documentaries and books. As a proud Detroiter and board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, I humbly submit American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs for consideration. Grace’s 70 years of organizing work and research as an activist, writer and speaker has touched every major US social movement of the past century. 

Finally, we conclude our four-part investigation “Deadly Denials” by Melanie Haiken on eating disorders and barriers to treatment  – a series supported by the Pulitzer Center — with a look at rural communities.

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The Trump administration’s war on universities

The mental health of students and professors is sagging under the Trump administration’s full-scale assault on universities. It’s particularly unrelenting at schools like Harvard that have refused to bow to pressure. A recent Guardian story offers a historical insight into “why the right detests the American campus.” 

In it, historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd starts by citing a 2021 speech from J.D. Vance’s Ohio senate campaign. In it, Vance declared that “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do…we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.”

Lassabe Shepherd writes: “The Maga movement, of which Vance, the vice-president, is now at the forefront, has been unabashedly on the attack against campuses, professors and students.” She highlights the administration’s verbal demonization of students, professors and protesters, as well as the material cruelty of visa terminations and the “gleeful” withholding of funds. 

These attacks are part of a century-old tradition resisting any and all democratization in higher education – Vance’s speech had been inspired by Richard Nixon’s feeling that “the universities are the enemy.”  For 300 years, universities were the near-exclusive province of the Christian male elite. As some campuses began to open up in the early 1900s, the all-male Protestant universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, worked to keep the ‘”socially undesirable,’ especially Jews,” out, the piece notes. Every step since – from desegregation to more inclusive curricula – has faced backlash from the right in different but familiar forms. Their  modern goal is “to defund, privatize and eventually abolish public higher education.” 

Small wonder, then, that the White House is currently vilifying students and revoking visas for the non-crimes of protesting, or writing an unfriendly editorial. A slice of good news is that Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was freed from federal custody on Friday, NPR reports. Öztürk was seized by ICE agents on the sidewalk in Boston and shipped off to a jail in Louisiana. At her bail hearing, Judge William K. Sessions said this seemed to be “solely in retaliation for” a student newspaper piece criticizing her school leaders’ response to the war on Gaza. A coalition of 27 Jewish groups, among many others, has protested her arrest and detention.

Öztürk told the court about her six weeks spent in a crowded, mouse-infested cell with 23 other women, which exacerbated her asthma. Her attorney welcomed the decision to free her, though she still faces potential deportation.

“We are relieved and ecstatic that she has been ordered released,” Mahsa Khanbabai said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it is 45 days too late. She has been imprisoned all these days for simply writing an op-ed that called for human rights and dignity for the people in Palestine. When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?”

– Diana Hembree

Problematic betting on sports is worsening among vulnerable adolescents 

Sports betting used to be banned federally — since that law was overturned in 2018, several states have chosen to legalize it, and problems associated with the habit have ballooned.  In Minnesota where sports betting isn’t yet legal, a 2022 survey found that 7.9% of teenage students were frequent gamblers and 0.7% were problem gamblers. Heather Eshleman, prevention manager at the Maryland Center of Excellence on Problem Gambling, told USA Today that she used to receive about three requests per year for presentations on sports betting addiction. Now that it’s legal, she’s hearing from three high school and college educators each month.

Saul Malek’s gambling first led to debt when he was 20, betting against his team – the Houston Rockets – in the 2018 NBA Western Conference finals.  He celebrated with his family when they won, but panicked knowing he now owed his bookie $1,500 he didn’t have.  Over the next two years, he’d sink another $24,000 into the hole. “My life was centered around gambling. If I wasn’t placing a bet, I was thinking of the next one,” Malek, now 27, said. 

That’s partly because, until they’re 25, adolescents’ executive functioning and decision-making skills are still developing, leaving them vulnerable to the volatile nature of gambling, said Timothy Fong, co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program. “A [teenager’s] brain doesn’t have impulse control. It doesn’t have the ability to recover from losses quickly,” Fong added. With gambling apps making betting easier than ever, teens and young adults are especially vulnerable to problem gambling without ever having to set foot inside a casino, and, despite knowing the odds, they associate winning with skill.

These days, Malek travels the country giving talks about sports betting addiction in young people. It’s much-needed: the hotline Eshelman’s center runs is also hearing from more and more teens and young adults. Advice from recovered addicts helped Malek turn things around, and he wishes he’d followed it sooner.. “I was so dead set on thinking that I could just figure things out, that I was smarter than any sort of addiction or that I could beat gambling,” Malek said. “[Realizing] that I don’t have all the answers has been more helpful than having the answers.”

In other news…

• Teacher Appreciation Week officially ended on May 9th, but there’s never a bad day to appreciate all that teachers do. Here are some great ways to let an educator know how deeply you value their work, suitable for every age and budget. 
• Remember Elmo of Sesame Street checking in with his audience to see how they were doing, and the online outpouring of grief that unleashed? Elmo was there to send his love. But now the puppet himself needs cheering up, because he is anxious about being “fired” by Trump after the president vowed to eliminate PBS:

• Congratulations to Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha! MindSite News followed his story in “Two Fathers, Two Versions of Hell” and just learned that Toha won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The prize was given for essays in The New Yorker  “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combined deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.” He is also the author of poetry collections Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear, published by City Lights in 2022, and Forest of Noise, published in 2024 by Knopf. – Diana Hembree

• As cannabis use becomes legal and less stigmatized, teens need to be careful: As states across the nation decriminalize marijuana use, psychiatrist and parent Carrie Bearden looks at relevant facts for families of teens experimenting with the substance. She issues a warning – adolescents ought to leave cannabis alone, because we don’t know enough about the harms today’s more powerful strains can wreak upon their developing brains. “Modern-day cannabis is simply not the same as the plant used in the 1960s through the 1980s or even as recently as 10 years ago. New strains of cannabis are highly potent, making them more addictive and potentially more dangerous,”  Bearden writes in Scientific American. She recommends avoiding cannabis until at least one’s mid-20s, “as a scientist and a parent…but I realize this advice may not be realistic. If your teens are going to use today’s cannabis, it is critically important that you be  aware of the data showing what a different beast this substance has become and the risk of major mental health issues it poses.”

• You Belong Here: Released back in March, You Belong Here, a graphic novel by Sara Phoebe Miller and illustrated by Morgan Beem, is packed with all the drama and emotion you’d expect from a group of high schoolers on the road to adulthood. But this is more than your typical story – it highlights older teens making tough yet solid decisions while navigating stereotypes, struggles with identity, self love, and mental health. Described by Kirkus Reviews as a “book that belongs in the hands of any reader anxious about a new chapter,” it might be perfect for the graduating seniors in your life.