Julie Bosman

At least 530 people have been sickened by mysterious lung illnesses related to using e-cigarettes with nicotine or vaping THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and at least eight have died. That has sent high schools, the epicenters of youth vaping, racing to give teenagers a new, urgent message: Vaping can be deadly.

Federal health officials have yet to pinpoint an exact cause of the recent illnesses, but the alarming pattern has put principals and teachers into crisis mode. They are holding assemblies to warn students about the dangers. They are getting creative with rules to make it harder for students to secretly vape in school bathrooms, hallways and even classrooms. They are trying to train parents and teachers on the wide array of vape devices, which look like pens or flash drives and which many adults do not even recognize.

During an assembly at one suburban Chicago high school this week, hundreds of students, many dressed in school colors of orange and black in honor of homecoming, saw an X-ray image of a young man’s lungs, cloudy and damaged, on an auditorium screen.

He had recently been hospitalized after vaping and placed in a medically induced coma for a week, a substance-abuse consultant told the students from a stage.

“His lungs are now that of a 70-year -old. He’s in his 20s,” the consultant, Ashleigh Nowakowski, said. “Can you imagine how that’s going to affect the rest of his life? He can’t run. He can’t play sports.”

The students watched solemnly. A few squirmed in their seats.

Administrators at American high schools have long tried to warn students about the risks of vaping, which gained popularity several years ago as an alternative to cigarettes and works by heating liquid and turning it into vapor to be inhaled. But the outbreak of illnesses has brought new level of urgency and attention to the issue. Students who had brushed off the warnings in the past, saying that vaping was relatively harmless, could no longer do so.

After the assembly, at Crystal Lake Central High School, 45 miles northwest of Chicago, some students said they were skeptical that vaping was as dangerous as the presentation suggested.

The students told of a high school ecosystem where vaping devices are easily obtained, and refill cartridges with THC oil, known as carts, are sold for $20 apiece. It is not uncommon, these students said, for seniors to sell vape pens to freshmen, eager to take up vaping.

Opportunities to vape discreetly are everywhere, they said — in an empty hallway, a bathroom stall or the back row of a classroom where a teacher cannot possibly monitor every student’s move. Older students said they tended to leave campus for lunch, vaping in their cars along the way.

“It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t do it,” said Alexis Padilla, 16, a junior. “You can’t go on social media without someone’s videos of them doing it.”

Last week, the Trump administration said it planned to ban most flavored e-cigarettes and nicotine pods, an attempt to curtail use among teenagers. States tend to regulate e-cigarettes like other nicotine products, and laws vary from state to state. At least a dozen states have passed laws restricting sales of e-cigarettes to young people; in Illinois, Arkansas and other states, the legal age for purchasing nicotine products, including e-cigarettes, is 21. In Texas, minors can be fined for possessing e-cigarettes.

But many teenagers sidestep the age restrictions by buying e-cigarettes online or from friends.

In one group of the Crystal Lake students — girls carrying patterned backpacks and wearing tattered Chuck Taylors — three said they personally knew people who had become seriously ill after vaping.

One friend who had vaped nicotine for two years using a Juul, the dominant seller in the market, was hospitalized with a respiratory lung defect, but has recovered, one student said. Another girl who vaped regularly suddenly couldn’t breathe one day, the students said, and she now has to use an inhaler every four hours.

Sophia Scarfe, a 17-year-old senior, said her parents routinely sent her news articles about the dangers of vaping. Many students have moved beyond vaping nicotine, she said, routinely using THC oils instead. “Vaping anything else other than nicotine is way more common,” she said.

Alcohol is still widely consumed among teenagers, they said. But “vaping is the big thing,” said Nyanan Bey, 17, a senior.

One student openly laughed when she heard a widely cited statistic from the 2019 National Youth Tobacco Survey that estimated that 1 in 4 youths between the ages of 12 and 17 have tried vaping nicotine or THC at least once.

“Yeah, that’s too low,” she said. “Literally everyone vapes.”

Health officials suspect that vaping-related illnesses and deaths are underreported, and that doctors have only recently begun to connect vaping to mysterious lung ailments.

And educators said they were beginning to grapple with the reality that a new generation of American teenagers, who would be loath to pick up cigarettes, are now addicted to nicotine through vaping.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the students at Crystal Lake Central, a school of 1,500 students, said Steve Greiner, student services coordinator.

“The kids in our school are like any other school,” he said. “People are really starting to realize, ‘Holy cow, this was seen as the answer to our prayers to get people off cigarettes.’ Now it’s turned into this.”

Administrators there have stationed teachers in the hallways between classes to deter vaping. Some have worried that Crystal Lake is only 30 miles from a town in Wisconsin where the police this month said they uncovered an illegal vape-pen factory that was producing 3,000 cartridges of THC-laced oil a day, with a distribution network that is believed to have been extensive.

At a separate informational session for teachers in the auditorium after school on Wednesday, another substance-abuse consultant guided teachers through the world of teenage vaping. The numbers “710” — which spell “oil” upside down — are a code for vaping, the consultant explained. Vaping devices might be found in unlikely, out-of-view places — inside the cord of a hoodie or dangling from a key chain. “Girls sew them into their jeans, next to the zipper,” Dave Shutters, the dean of students, added.

In Crystal Lake, the typical response to a student caught vaping is counseling and other efforts to provide information about the dangers. Some schools have tried vaping support groups.

At Nerinx Hall, an all-girls Catholic school in the St. Louis area, students are planning a peer-driven “amnesty week,” where they hope to make an “emotional appeal” to one another and offer a chance to dump vaping equipment at a secure drop-off location, said Meta Stephens, the senior class treasurer.

“We really want it to be no pressure: You will not get in trouble for this,” said Stephens, 17, who is helping plan the event this fall. “We really just want to help you stop if you want to.”

This article originally appeared in

At School, 'Everyone Vapes,' and Adults Are in Crisis Mode

CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. — In Alabama, a school removed the doors from bathroom stalls to stop students from sneaking inside to vape. In Colorado, a school decided to forfeit a school volleyball game after finding “widespread vaping” and other infractions by the team. And in Pennsylvania, at a school where administrators have tried installing sensors to detect vaping in bathrooms and locker rooms, students caught with vape devices face a $50 fine and a three-day suspension.

That collection could soon be opened to the public after an auction Wednesday in Chicago.

The winning bid came from a group of four major foundations, who in a flurry of phone calls, emails and texts over the last nine days, banded together in a highly unusual effort and bought the archive for $30 million.

Leaders of the foundations — the Ford Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — said Thursday that they were determined to save the archive, considered the most significant collection of photography depicting African American life in the 20th century. They agreed to donate the archive to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute so that it would be widely accessible to researchers, scholars and the public.

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in an interview that the group began to form only last week. He said he was at the Prado Museum in Madrid last Tuesday when he read a news article about the impending auction on his phone. Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, emailed Walker, suggesting — with a great deal of urgency — that they had to do something.

“The narrative that is held in that archive is central to the narrative of America in the second half of the 20th century,” Walker said. “The concern was that it should be brought into the public domain.”

Walker and Alexander talked to leaders of two more institutions and brought them on board. Each foundation promised between $5 million and $12.5 million.

Ebony and Jet, once ubiquitous publications in the homes of African American families, chronicled the lives of black politicians, civil rights leaders, musicians, athletes, writers and everyday people.

The auction was part of bankruptcy proceedings for Johnson Publishing, based in Chicago, which founded the magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. The company, which sold the titles years ago but held onto the photo archive, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in April.

The sale of the photographs is subject to court approval.

Alexander said it was too early to say exactly what would be done with the millions of photos in the archive, but the guiding principle is that the public should be able to see them.

“For decades, people found black life in its full variety in Johnson publications,” Alexander said. “I think we actually cannot even fully measure what it is going to mean to have these images available.”

The news was a relief to historians who feared that the Ebony archive would be acquired by a collector and hidden away.

“It is impossible to overstate the importance of the accessibility of Ebony and Jet archive for not only historians and researchers, for the general public,” said Sarah Lewis, a historian at Harvard. “Understanding American culture means understanding African American culture. This collection, as an archive, offers an invaluable oculus onto black life.”

The archive has been held in a warehouse in Chicago as its fate was being determined. The auction began last week and attracted multiple bidders, continuing until Wednesday. Details of the other bids were not made public.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/ebony-photographs-sale.html" id="348ddac4-bb97-355d-ac74-2c4c1222e77b">The New York Times</a>.

Ebony's Photo Archive Goes for $30 Million, for Future in Public View

CHICAGO — For decades, the photo archive of Ebony and Jet magazines has been difficult to access and largely mysterious to scholars, an elusive treasure trove of more than 4 million prints and negatives that documented the lives of African Americans.

<h1>The outlines of the story were infuriating yet familiar: A young man of privilege was accused of a serious crime, arrested, prosecuted and then treated gently by a judge.</h1>

This week, it was a New Jersey teenager identified in court documents only as G.M.C., who prosecutors said raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl at a party, made a cellphone video of the act and then shared the video with friends, adding: “When your first time having sex was rape.”

The judge dismissed the young man’s own description of what he did. Instead, court documents said, the judge wondered if the accuser and her mother had considered the devastating effect on the boy’s life this charge might have. The boy “comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well,” the judge said, noting that the young man was an Eagle Scout.

“He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college,” Judge James Troiano of Superior Court, sitting in Monmouth County, said last year.

As Troiano’s comments became widely known to the public this week, they were met with outrage and calls for him to be barred from the bench. But there was also widespread frustration that variations of the same scenario seem to play out on a loop in the nation’s criminal justice system, allowing people with markers of privilege — whether in education, wealth or race — to be given light treatment, probation or short sentences.

As Josie Duffy Rice, a host of a “Justice in America” podcast, wrote on Twitter, “These stories epitomize the reasons women often choose not to report their sexual assault. In a system like this, with judges like these, in a world that prioritizes men’s potential over women’s lived experiences — why would you?”

Troiano was no rogue judge, experts in criminal justice said, and the sentiments he voiced in court — expressing concern for the future prospects of the accused, while glossing over harm inflicted on the victim — were not particularly extraordinary.

“He is not an appalling outlier,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law who has studied sexual violence. “He gave voice to something that is woven into the fabric of our culture. There’s a long-standing tradition of trivializing harm to victims of sexual assault and focusing instead on harm to perpetrators.”

Tuerkheimer calls the phenomenon the “care gap,” in which “there’s a lot of space between the care, the attention, the pull on our heartstrings that we all tend to give to accused men, particularly when they’re privileged,” rather than to the women who are victims of sexual violence.

Other high-profile cases that have attracted media attention in recent years fit a similar pattern and have prompted nationwide calls for sentencing reform.

Brock Turner, a former swimmer at Stanford University, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman after a party and convicted on charges of sexual assault of an unconscious person, sexual assault of an intoxicated person and sexual assault with intent to commit rape.

He was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation in 2016, and was released from jail after three months. The judge, facing a furious outcry over the sentence, was recalled last year by California voters.

Owen Labrie, once a student at the exclusive St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, was convicted in 2015 of sexually assaulting a classmate during a “senior salute,” a campus ritual in which seniors met younger students for romantic encounters before graduation. Labrie, then 18, invited a 15-year-old girl to a rooftop, where she said he raped her.

He was released early from jail for good behavior last month after serving six months.

Then there was Ethan Couch, a Texas teenager who killed four people and severely injured another while driving drunk in June 2016. Prosecutors sought a 20-year prison sentence, but a psychologist who testified in Couch’s defense argued that he suffered from “affluenza,” psychological afflictions said to result from growing up with wealth and privilege.

Couch served a 720-day sentence in a Texas jail, a penalty that one victim’s family said was lenient and influenced by the wealth of Couch’s family.

In the New Jersey case that drew anger, the judge involved was rebuked by an appeals court for his handling of the accusation of rape, and the case will be moved to a grand jury.

“That the juvenile came from a good family and had good test scores we assume would not condemn the juveniles who do not come from good families and do not have good test scores from withstanding waiver application,” the panel wrote in its decision. Troiano is retired but occasionally fills vacancies on the bench.

Elizabeth L. Jeglic, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the case could reflect a common sentiment in criminal sentencing, in which people sympathize with other people who are similar to them.

“Maybe the judge identified with this family or individual,” she said. “People are subject to biases. Wealth does influence sentencing, as well as race and class. It’s not usually as obvious as it is in these cases.”

Research has shown that African Americans receive longer sentences than white people, she said, and that judges often rely too heavily on their own intuition when making decisions.

“My take home from this is that this is obviously egregious,” Jeglic said. “But it’s the perfect timing for it, as we are now having conversations about criminal justice reform, and part of that conversation is sentencing.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/us/rich-privilege-courts.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

A privileged teenager is treated gently by a judge, it's a familiar story

This week, it was a New Jersey teenager identified in court documents only as G.M.C., who prosecutors said raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl at a party, made a cellphone video of the act and then shared the video with friends, adding: “When your first time having sex was rape.”

<h1>CHICAGO — The task of printing forms for the 2020 census was already enormous and difficult, with an immovable once-a-decade deadline mandated by the Constitution.</h1>

On Thursday, the Supreme Court made the printing of census forms — a job held by one company, R.R. Donnelley — even more onerous.

Over decades in Chicago, R.R. Donnelley has printed bestselling novels, direct mail, copies of The New Yorker and Sears catalogs. Now the company has been left to grapple with the logistical nightmare of meeting a deadline of national importance without knowing when the job will start.

Donnelley won a $115 million contract to print more than 1 billion questionnaires, postcards, letters, envelopes and inserts for the 2020 census. Production will take place at several of the company’s facilities around the country, according to the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

But before it can begin printing those forms, the company needs to know whether the census will include a question on whether the people filling it out are U.S. citizens. The Census Bureau has said that it needs to begin printing forms in July, setting a deadline of Monday. But one senior census official has said the bureau could wait until as late as Oct. 31 to begin if necessary, an assessment that some experts have disputed.

The deadline for completing the job is only months away. The first census forms must be distributed in Alaska in January; by law, the count must be completed by Dec. 31, 2020.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s stated reason for adding the question about citizenship, but there is still a possibility that the administration could return with adequate justifications for it. It could be months until the situation is resolved.

In back-to-back posts on Twitter, President Donald Trump said Thursday that the court’s decision was “totally ridiculous,” adding, “I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”

But Trump’s desire for a delay could run afoul of the Constitution, which requires the federal government to count every person in the country once every 10 years.

Government experts say that adding the citizenship question would deter many Hispanic immigrants from participating in the census, leading to an undercount of about 6.5 million people.

A spokeswoman for Donnelley did not return a call and email seeking comment. The company has been a presence in Chicago, once the center of publishing in America, since its founder, Richard Robert Donnelley, arrived in the city in 1864.

Seven years later, its building burned in the Great Chicago Fire and was rebuilt.

Donnelley was once colloquially known as “Mother Donnelley” for its nurturing attitude toward its employees, and it is now the second-largest printing company in the country.

The company, which also produced the 2010 census, plans to spend at least $135 million on capital improvements this year, according to Crain’s Chicago Business — money that will in part go to new printing equipment and preparations for the census.

Margo Anderson, a census historian and the author of “The American Census: A Social History,” said she has seen two mock-ups of the 2020 census questionnaire, one form with the citizenship question and one without it. Census officials planned to begin printing the forms after they got the Supreme Court’s decision.

“Basically what they’ve planned is, there are two forms, the printer has both mock-ups, and when we get the court’s decision, they’ll push the button on this one and not that one,” she said.

For now, it was uncertain when that would happen.

Congress has complicated the census questionnaire before, Anderson said. Only two months before the 1910 census, a question on languages was added.

“The difference was that that was back in the day when enumerators took the census,” she said, referring to census takers who go door to door. “So all you had to do was send new instructions to the enumerators. The difference now is that we’ve automated all of this, and most of it is self-enumeration.”

James Clement, an analyst for Buckingham Research Group who studies the printing industry, said that the timeline for producing census materials had already been compressed by earlier delays in picking a printing company for the project.

If printing is delayed in the weeks ahead, Donnelley might wind up requiring its workers to log overtime hours and work on the weekends, Clement predicted.

“It’s a large, arduous and complicated process,” he said, adding, “I can say definitively that this is the only company in the country, if not the world, that would actually be able to handle this job.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/census-printing.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Printing giant has deadline, but the job is not yet set

On Thursday, the Supreme Court made the printing of census forms — a job held by one company, R.R. Donnelley — even more onerous.

Altogether, four people have been killed and 17 wounded, according to law enforcement authorities and media reports, with two recent shootings — at a university in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week and at a school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, this week — accounting for the bulk of the toll.

The New York Times defined a school shooting as one that occurred on campus and involved students, either as the accused perpetrators or the victims.

Jan. 31, Memphis, Tennessee

A 14-year-old at Manassas High School in Memphis was shot with a pellet gun at school, according to news reports. The student’s injury was not life-threatening.

Feb. 8, Baltimore, Maryland

A man entered Frederick Douglass High School and shot and wounded a staff member, prompting students to hide in their classrooms at the sound of gunfire. Police said they believed the gunman had targeted the victim, a 56-year-old special education assistant.

Feb. 12, Kansas City, Missouri

A teenage girl was shot and killed outside a high school in Kansas City after an argument at an evening basketball game. Police said the assailant and girl knew each other, and that it appeared the suspect had waited in the parking lot and shot the girl as she left the game.

Feb. 26, Montgomery, Alabama

A 17-year-old student at Robert E. Lee High School was shot and wounded in an arm by another student, police said. The school was placed on lockdown and the assailant was arrested. According to media reports, it was the second time in two years that a student had taken a gun to that school and shot another student.

April 1, Prescott, Arkansas

A 14-year-old eighth-grader at Prescott High School was shot and injured by a classmate, who the authorities said took a concealed handgun to school.

April 30, Charlotte, North Carolina

Two students were killed and four were wounded after a gunman opened fire in an anthropology class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. One of the students who was killed, Riley Howell, was credited with charging and body slamming the gunman, stopping the massacre.

May 7, Highlands Ranch, Colorado

One student was killed and eight others were injured this week in an attack on an English class at STEM School Highlands Ranch. Two students were apprehended and charged with the shooting, which took place just miles from Columbine High School, the site of a massacre 20 years ago.

May 7, Savannah, Georgia

A Savannah State University student was shot and wounded in a residential hall on campus. Authorities said a man who was not a student was arrested in the shooting.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d54477d0-0dff-3922-a1f2-8d6b5ae7478c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/school-shootings-2019.html">The New York Times</a>.

How Many School Shootings Have There Been in 2019?

Across the country this year, according to media reports, at least eight shootings have taken place on high school or college campuses. They have occurred inside gyms and classrooms, in parking lots and school hallways.

How many school shootings have there been in 2019?

“I was freaking out in there,” Traini said, jabbing her finger at the store. “I needed to buy a present for a birthday, so I was forced to go. I was nervous the whole time.”

This is life during a measles outbreak for parents of babies: a maelstrom of fear, isolation, truncated plans and, not infrequently, unfiltered fury.

Children typically do not receive their first dose of measles vaccine until after their first birthday. So parents of infants are trapped in a dangerous limbo. They want to protect their children from measles, an extremely contagious virus that killed 110,000 people around the world in 2017, most of them young children. Yet they have little choice but to chance exposing their yet-to-be-vaccinated babies any time they leave home.

The concern is upending family routines, leaving some parents of infants steering clear of public transit, playgrounds, malls and more. For Traini, 41, who teaches biology at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, going out with Gretha at all felt like a risky move. They live in Oakland County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, which in recent weeks has been the site of a major measles outbreak, mostly in Orthodox Jewish areas. At least 43 people have been reported ill in Michigan.

The number of measles cases in the United States has surpassed 700, the highest figure recorded in any year since the disease was declared eliminated in this country in 2000, federal health officials said.

Many people, vaccinated or not, seem unaware of the particular vulnerability of infants. But current parents of babies have suddenly grown acutely aware, sharing information on playgrounds, in pediatricians’ offices and on Facebook. For many, the days of watching new cases of measles pop up around the country — a reflection of the rise of the anti-vaccination movement and of measles outbreaks in other countries where Americans travel — have been agonizing.

“It’s just maddening, because I shouldn’t have to worry about measles,” said Katherine Jones, 37, a grant manager at an environmental nonprofit group in San Francisco and the mother of an eight-week-old baby.

For people who don’t vaccinate their children, she said, “It’s a choice.”

But she added: “It’s not a choice for me, because my baby cannot be vaccinated. The folks who are choosing not to vaccinate their children or be vaccinated themselves are putting my child in danger.”

Pediatricians say that giving the measles vaccine to children younger than a year old is usually unnecessary and may be ineffective, in part because babies that age still have antibodies from their mothers that could inhibit their response to the vaccine. If their mothers were fully immunized, babies may be born with some protection from measles, but it varies from child to child, said Dr. Annabelle De St. Maurice, an expert on infectious diseases at UCLA.

Giving the measles vaccine at 12 to 15 months of age leads to a higher proportion of protected children than giving it earlier does, she said.

In New York, the site of the largest measles outbreak so far this year, parents are worrying whether their babies should be taken on the subway. Children have been pulled out of day care. Pediatricians have been lobbied by parents to administer the measles vaccine early.

In Michigan, cafes and shopping centers suddenly seem less safe.

“There are just some places that we don’t go,” said Lucretia Sims, 29, as she walked outdoors in Farmington Hills, Michigan, with her 7-month-old son, Ayden, in a stroller. She said she has been keeping him away from other children.

“I think people have gotten a little selfish,” she said of families who believe that vaccines cause more harm than good, despite scientific studies that have, for instance, found no link between vaccines and autism. “We depend on the community to take care of each other. The babies have no options.”

The measles virus is extremely virulent: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “you can catch measles just by being in a room where a person with measles has been, up to two hours after that person is gone.”

“My recommendation has been to try not to go out to public places until this calms down,” said Dr. Matthew Hornik, a pediatrician in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “And asking those people around them, are you vaccinated? Are your kids vaccinated or not?”

Some pediatricians make exceptions to the one-year rule during outbreaks, administering the measles vaccine to children as young as 6 months old. They will also commonly make the same exception for babies who will be traveling abroad. The CDC recommends giving the vaccine early in those situations.

Even so, many parents said they had been denied an early vaccine for their babies, and were instead left to consider whether to take other precautions.

“You can’t put yourself in a bubble,” said Kayli Scott, 28, whose second baby is due in August, adding that she was determined not to alter her routine if measles is still a problem after her baby is born. “We’re still going to go out,” she said.

In the aisles of a Buy Buy Baby store in Oakland County last week, Bridgett Murray recounted her daily routine to protect her three-month-old daughter, Sloane, during the current outbreak.

When Murray gets home each day from her job at a private school in suburban Detroit, she vigorously scrubs her hands with soap and water. Then she changes out of her work clothes into a fresh outfit. Only then will she pick up Sloane.

“It’s definitely scary,” she said. “I contemplated not going back to work after maternity leave.”

Elle Gotham, a lawyer in Detroit, phoned the day care center that her baby, Penelope, attends three days a week to ask whether it serves many children from the northern suburbs, where the outbreak has been most pronounced.

“They said very few,” Gotham said. “If it gets into a day care, it’s a disaster.”

Some friendships between families who vaccinate and those who do not have suffered.

“We have friends who don’t believe in vaccines, and those friendships aren’t going to be maintained at the risk of her health,” said one father, who gave his name only as Mike, as he pushed his 11-month-old daughter down a street in Royal Oak, Michigan. “Anti-vaxxers aren’t allowed in our house.”

Jill Dumme of Grand Rapids, Michigan, the mother of an 8-month-old named Benjamin, said she had tried to avoid the topic with her friends, most of whom do not vaccinate. She said she won’t bring Benjamin near their children.

"They’re so passionate about it, and so anti-vax,” she said. “I love them, so I’m not going to sit and argue with them about it. You do you, I’ll do me. But until my kids are safe, I’m going to steer clear.”

Colleen Serafini, of Pleasant Hill, California, said she has been reading news reports about measles outbreaks late at night, thinking about her daughter, Tess, who is a few weeks away from her first birthday.

It is surreal to be stuck worrying about a once-eradicated disease, she said, recalling a hike she and her husband once took in a state park named after Jack London, who wrote a century ago about a post-apocalyptic America ravaged by plague.

“We were talking about what a scary time it was then to have kids, when they got these diseases,” Serafini said. “To be talking about that again is absurd.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/measles-babies-vaccine.html" id="3375bad3-a391-334c-ae3d-5ac3b0f36a1a">The New York Times</a>.

TROY, Mich. — Roberta Traini gritted her teeth through the small talk at the Barnes &amp; Noble checkout, grabbed her purchases and hustled her 5-month-old daughter, Gretha, into the chilly April air, where it was safer to breathe.

Too Young for Vaccinations, With Measles in the Air

“My recommendation has been to try not to go out to public places until this calms down,” said Dr. Matthew Hornik, a pediatrician in Southfield, Michigan. “And asking those people around them, are you vaccinated? Are your kids vaccinated or not?”

Parents of Babies Too Young to Vaccinate Feel Trapped by Measles Outbreak

In the aisles of a Buy Buy Baby store in Oakland County last wee, Bridgett Murray recounted her daily routine to protect her three-month-old daughter, Sloane, during the current outbreak.

On her lunch break in the Loop, Denise Thompson, 54, had a different view.

“We’re making history, sure,” she said. “But a black woman running the city will be just like anybody else.”

On Tuesday, Chicagoans were headed to the polls to vote for a successor to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Residents were choosing between two African American women, guaranteeing that Chicago will become the largest U.S. city to elect a black woman as its mayor.

Competing in the runoff election are Lori Lightfoot, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor, and Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board and chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party. Both women beat out 12 other candidates in an election in February, a who’s who of well-known names that made up the most crowded ballot in municipal history.

As the voting began, the historic nature of the election was greeted in Chicago with both pride and nonchalance, a sense that electing an African American woman as mayor would be significant, but not seismic.

Maybe it is because Chicago has already seen such milestones, sending the first African American president, Barack Obama, to the White House; helping elect the first African American woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, in 1992; and making Harold Washington the city’s first black mayor in 1983.

“It is tremendous,” said Josie Brown Childs, a civic leader who worked for Washington in the 1980s. “But Chicago has been on the forefront of certain black politics, whether it was with Harold or Obama. We’ve been in the lead on those things.”

In interviews around the city during the run-up to the election, Chicagoans said they were carefully weighing the platforms and promises of Preckwinkle and Lightfoot, watching their performances in televised debates and considering what kind of leader the current moment in Chicago demands.

“For me, personally, I’m asking, ‘Who is going to be the break from politics as usual in Chicago?’” said Jordie Davies, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago whose dissertation focuses on political activism. “I’m excited about two black women. But I’m looking at records. I’m looking at who is going to offer the most holistic platform for addressing problems in Chicago.”

Deidre Baumann, 50, a lawyer who cast her vote Tuesday at a library in the Budlong Woods neighborhood on the North Side, said she would be happy with whichever candidate prevailed.

“Either way, this is a historic election,” she said.

She watched the debates and studied the candidates’ records carefully, she said, deciding in the end to vote for Lightfoot, who she believed would bring her experience as a federal prosecutor to push for criminal justice reform.

“We have to make this city safe for all the citizens and the police,” Baumann said. “On the other hand, we cannot continue to incarcerate black and brown people in disparate numbers.”

In her eyes, Preckwinkle represented an older political model. “I’m disturbed a bit by her ties to the machine,” she said. “She always touted herself as the progressive candidate. She’s had to move away from that as she navigated the political system in Chicago.”

The new mayor must contend with a host of complicated issues in the nation’s third-largest city, including a deep pension crisis, persistent violent crime, reform of the Police Department and the question of how to spur investment and growth in long-neglected and segregated neighborhoods on Chicago’s West and South sides. Under Emanuel, the downtown has boomed, flourishing with tech companies, high-rise hotels, a sparkling riverfront and luxury apartments. But many African American residents have moved out of the city in recent years. Emanuel, who was elected to two terms, did not seek a third term in office.

Polls have suggested that Lightfoot has a commanding lead over Preckwinkle, who entered the race last September after Emanuel announced that he would not run again. Preckwinkle garnered endorsements from powerful labor groups — the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union — and from prominent black leaders including Jesse White, the secretary of state.

Lightfoot had a head start on the campaign trail, declaring her candidacy for mayor in May 2018, when it was widely believed that she would face off against Emanuel.

A relatively unknown figure who has never held elective office, Lightfoot has spent time introducing herself to voters as a candidate who would focus on overhauling the Police Department, curbing street violence and rebuilding neighborhoods beyond the affluent downtown and North Side. Ra Joy, an entrepreneur in Chicago who was a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2018, endorsed Lightfoot early in the race, he said Saturday at a candidate forum at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition on the South Side.

A mayoral contest between two African American women has scrambled the usual political calculus in Chicago, or what Joy called “tribal voting,” in which politicians could count on support from voters of their own race.

“It’s turned that notion on its head,” he said, adding that the successful candidate would have to build coalitions of Latinos, whites and African Americans in a city where the population is almost evenly divided among the three groups.

Celestine A. Strain, 46, a hospital technician, brought her granddaughter Kalicia, 9, to the forum at Rainbow PUSH, hoping Kalicia would someday remember seeing two black women running for mayor of Chicago.

“It’s amazing for her to see,” Strain said, adding that she was hoping Preckwinkle, who has been a familiar face in county government for years, would emerge victorious Tuesday. “I really believe that she has the right experience.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson offered no endorsement in the race, saying that he hoped to be more of a peacemaker after what played out in recent weeks as a bitter campaign. On stage Saturday, he urged both candidates to sign a statement agreeing to appear together the morning after the election. “I wanted to play a reconciling role,” Jackson said in an interview in his office at Rainbow PUSH. “The campaign ends. Let the healing begin.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/us/chicago-election-lightfoot-preckwinkle.html" id="06a5483b-4742-30b6-ac5f-f80caae86433">The New York Times</a>.

Chicago Votes on a New Mayor. Either Way, an African American Woman Will Win.

CHICAGO — Adrianne Burton, 38, believes that the next mayor of Chicago will have a sharper, more empathetic eye on the public schools. Carolyn Davenport, 62, is confident that the new mayor will be a superior manager, accustomed to running a career and a household without any fuss.

The prosecutor’s version was more complicated. He secured a 16-count felony indictment, then dropped all the charges with no warning. He added a hasty and bewildering postscript, saying that the actor — though officially cleared — had not been exonerated of wrongdoing.

The actor, Jussie Smollett, had the simplest story of all: He’s innocent.

All three narratives collided this week in Chicago, a city riven by race, class, violence and secrecy. It was the ideal backdrop.

“The story is bizarre from beginning to end,” Sara Paretsky, the Chicago novelist whose best-selling mysteries are set in the city, said in an email Tuesday night.

She had followed the story from the beginning, and found herself “profoundly depressed” by the decision by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office to drop the charges. “Every time I think we’ve elected someone who might rise above the corruption that encases Chicago like a wool glove on a hot July day, the electee runs to do something to prove it’s the same old same old.”

On Wednesday, the confusion of the day before — a whirl of accusations, dropped charges, fiery news conferences and chaotic courthouse scenes — had hardly cleared.

The saga surrounding Smollett, a star of Fox drama “Empire,” began in Chicago in January, when he filed a police report saying that he had been attacked while walking downtown by two men who not only put a rope around his neck, but also made racial and homophobic slurs and said that Chicago was “MAGA country.”

A national outpouring of sympathy followed, even from President Donald Trump, who called the incident “horrible.” Police investigated for weeks, scouring surveillance video for evidence of the attack.

But in February, authorities in Chicago said they believed Smollett had staged the mugging and apparent hate crime in an effort to get attention and a pay raise.

And Tuesday came the most dramatic twist of all: The Cook County state’s attorney’s office announced abruptly that all charges would be dropped against Smollett, who appeared at the courthouse looking serene. He stood in front of a scrum of reporters, read from handwritten notecards and declared that he had been vindicated.

“I’ve been truthful and consistent on every single level since Day 1,” he said. “This has been an incredibly difficult time, honestly one of the worst of my entire life, but I am a man of faith, and I’m a man that has knowledge of my history, and I would not bring my family, our lives or the movement through a fire like this.”

As he left the courthouse, Smollett posed with fans. The court file on his case was sealed immediately.

Joe Magats, the prosecutor who made the decision to drop the charges, scrambled to explain himself, saying in an interview that Smollett was not a threat to public safety.

And across the city, where they gathered for a graduation ceremony for police officers, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Eddie Johnson, the police superintendent, were caught by surprise.

“From top to bottom, this is not on the level,” said a furious Emanuel, who is not running for re-election. He called the action by the prosecutor “a whitewash of justice.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8e0ec259-0e2e-4668-8fec-a246ed48109b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/us/jussie-smollett-joe-magats-chicago.html">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — The mayor and the police told one story. Theirs was a panoramic tale of greed and vanity, of an actor who hungered for more money and fame, staged a hoax making him the victim of a hate crime, paid off two accomplices, besmirched the name of a good city and then, maddeningly, got away with it.

Julie Bosman

Articles written by the author

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