The Splinternet: How a global fight for control of the digital superhighway threatens to destabilize it
By Nick Merrill, Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley You try to use your credit card, but it doesn’t work. In fact, no one’s credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can’t access any of those, either. Neither can...
Fearing Eviction: Milwaukee-area residents endure long waits to receive federal rental assistance
Freda Young had to move quickly in November. A dispute with her upstairs neighbor made staying in her home unsafe, she said. The Milwaukee woman was juggling moving and caring for her daughter, who suffers from seizures. Three months had passed without an update on...
Cycles of debt: Research indicates that driver’s license suspensions over unpaid fines targets Black drivers
By Sian Mughan, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, Arizona State University Imagine being unable to pay a US$50 traffic ticket and, as a result, facing mounting fees so high that even after paying hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars toward your debt you still...
COVID-19 Funerals: Grieving families can receive sizable financial aid if they can navigate FEMA’s bureaucracy
Shenora Staten-Jordan felt lost when her father, Gary Lee Staten, died of COVID-19 in May. She had not expected to lose him so soon at age 61, or for a contagious disease to hinder her goodbye. All of that only strengthened her Milwaukee family’s wishes to give Staten...
Breakthrough Infection: Growing circulation of delta variant prompts Wisconsin to update health guidance
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) announced support for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s recommendations that were issued on July 27. The Delta variant of COVID-19 is highly infectious and is spreading more quickly than any other...
A Culture of Unaccountability: Republicans turned away from personal responsibility long before COVID
“It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions,” declared Ronald Reagan at the 1968 Republican National Convention. By the time he became president 12 years later, this idea – that individuals can be trusted to act...
Racial Battle Fatigue: The exhaustion of reproving what has already been proven
When I was in tenth grade I took a math class on geometry. I did not enjoy the class, the teacher or the concepts. It seemed very disconnected to the real world to me at the time. Since then I have found very few things in that class useful to me in the real world....
Milwaukee Notebook: The 1879 scandal over rotten food and abuse at Milwaukee’s House of Corrections
In 1879, Milwaukeeans were shocked to learn of abusive treatment at the county-operated House of Corrections. Inmates, they learned, were routinely fed rotting meat, physically and verbally abused by guards, and could be punished with solitary confinement in a small,...
How the Capitol attack inquiry reveals the depths of White Supremacist ideology in Trump’s supporters
As the Capitol attack inquiry began with emotional testimony by police officers who came face-to-face with Trump’s racist and proto-fascist mob, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that what happened on January 6, 2021, a day that will also live in infamy,...
Suffering that sells: When society would rather pay to bury us than support a life in which we are thriving
They say that sex sells, but more and more, it seems like trauma has taken its place. As a Black femme, I was taught from an early age that I shouldn’t ask for help until I absolutely, positively had no other choice. Being a child of immigrants from Haiti only...
A Mismatched Workforce: Wisconsin’s jobless struggle to find lost jobs after COVID-19
Ideally, the 65-year-old would return to her old job of digitizing government documents for Data Dimensions in Janesville, Wisconsin. But she can’t. The company laid her off in March 2020, temporarily at first, when COVID-19 struck. The layoff became permanent last...
Twelve years of stagnation: Wisconsin’s essential workers continue fighting for $15 minimum-wage
Years ago when he was working for the discount retailer Kmart, Gary Lemke saw the cost of low wages: high employee turnover. Lemke estimates as many as half the workers would leave in a year. That meant more than just having to hire and train new people. He is...
