The dangers of compost, according to Mary Phelan and Art Plotnik, quoted in Chicagoland Gardening (September/October): “When you see how beautifully it breaks down one type of waste, you start looking at everything you don’t like.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Doctor, do you have a problem with my skin? “What is most striking about this multitude of studies is the consistency of the findings” showing that whites receive better medical care than blacks, writes H. Jack Geiger in the New England Journal of Medicine (September 12). “Researchers have drawn on many different data bases covering every type of acute care hospital, including free-care institutions in the Veterans Affairs system. They have controlled for age, sex, Medicare and other insurance status, income, disease severity, concomitant morbid conditions, and underlying incidence and prevalence rates in the population subgroups under study. Yet the results have almost always pointed in the same direction. In one multihospital study, Kahn et al. found deficiencies in the most basic components of clinical care for black and poor patients as compared with patients who were white and more affluent, although all were Medicare beneficiaries. Numerous other studies have shown that blacks are less likely to receive renal transplants, receive hip or total knee replacements, and undergo gastrointestinal endoscopy, among other procedures, but are more likely to undergo hysterectomy and amputation of the lower limb.”
Urban high schools are organized for failure, according to Melissa Roderick of the U. of C. (University of Chicago Chronicle, September 26). They’re too big and offer too little help. “Students are thrown into chaotic environments that are much larger than their eighth-grade environments”–in Chicago, more than 500 percent bigger. “Even students who enter high school with good math and reading skills and those who attend school regularly face a one in three chance of failing a major subject in the first semester of ninth grade.” And then it’s tough to recover. “The real failure of high schools is that when 14-year-olds start to mess up–and they will mess up–our high schools are not organized to provide the help they need.”
