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A few weeks into my Ph.D. program, as the new students were still getting acquainted with one another, the conversation turned to our parents’ professions. I wasn’t surprised to learn that quite a few of my new classmates had parents who were professors; the rest were in other highly respected professions. I was too embarrassed to share that my parents had no higher education. They were denied it because they grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China.

I am a narrative historian, not a theorist or policy maven. But if the left hopes to build a politics that can appeal to most working Americans, I would argue that its thinkers might start by grappling with two critical matters that cry out for understanding and plausible solutions: migration and the future of work in the age of AI. The left has to oppose the… administration’s brutal treatment of noncitizens and the Republican Party’s efforts to allow AI firms to develop free of regulation. But opposition to bad policies alone never leads to better ones. Both of these issues are connected to class discontents, but in ways that require creative and heterodox thinking. It will not be easy for the broad left to convincingly speak to these concerns or to design paths forward, but it is essential to make a commitment to doing so.

A spokeswoman for the Nevada School Social Work Association said that if approved, the third plan would contribute to a 66% loss of school social worker services within the Nye County School District.

Lawless has turned her life around due in no small part to being a mother and wanting to show up as a role model for her kids, Logan (age 3) and Khloe (age 11).

Feeling constantly drained might not just be about poor sleep or working too hard. Researchers in Japan found that low levels of key vitamins — especially vitamin B12 and folate — may quietly contribute to fatigue and lack of motivation, even in otherwise healthy people.

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

Anahi Solei Gonzales graduated from Northern Arizona University with a bachelor’s degree in social work, leaving the university as a President’s Prize and Golden Axe recipient who is ready to make an impact in her community…. Her journey at NAU started before she even attended. She was encouraged by her older sister who had previously attended and participated in the Success Transition and Academic Readiness (STAR) program, a program that helps Arizona resident, low-income high school students transition into postsecondary education.

This is a recurring cycle. Teresa Sullivan, a former president of the University of Virginia, was targeted (ultimately unsuccessfully) for removal in 2012 in part because of her insufficient enthusiasm for massive open online courses (MOOCs)—more specifically, because she doubted the financial analysis UVA’s board of visitors drew from a David Brooks op-ed. So, when we talk about what work AI does on campus, we should be alert to not just what code is written with Claude or what spreadsheets are cleaned with Gemini but also what political and economic functions the technology serves within our institutions—and for whom.

The Auburn University Board of Trustees on Friday gave itself complete control over course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials while eliminating shared governance at the Alabama land-grant university. Faculty say they have serious concerns about the policies and a host of unanswered questions about what the changes will mean in practice. The two policies, passed unanimously without discussion, mimic what Alabama House Bill 580 will require of other public institutions when it takes effect in October.

On May 19, the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities (IJRAH) removed a review article by Robert Keith Head suggesting the theory of parental alienation is unsupported by research and fails “to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs”…. Head, a social worker and doctoral candidate at Capella University in Minneapolis, said he stands behind the work. The complaints against his paper consist of disputed scholarly interpretations, contested source counts and disagreements about how the literature should be characterized, none of which meet the COPE threshold for retraction, he told us.

A new IT tool for council social workers has had its launch delayed from this summer to late autumn, according to a council document. The Mosaic software, which provides case management tools for social workers, already had its launch delayed from March to June earlier this year.

We read with great interest Carlo Bordoni’s recent article in Social Europe, in which he argues that sociology is progressively surrendering its public voice to philosophy. It is a stimulating and provocative intervention, not least because it revisits a longstanding concern about the changing status of sociology in late modernity and echoes themes associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Yet Bordoni’s diagnosis ultimately rests on a narrative of disciplinary decline that risks overstating both the coherence sociology once possessed and the extent to which philosophy has replaced it as a mode of public diagnosis.

Workers can adapt; people are endlessly resourceful. The risk is that “reskilling” becomes the excuse that makes mass unemployment politically palatable and, basically, the victim’s fault. If it’s being touted as the bridge to an AI future, it must lead somewhere. Otherwise, it’s just a signpost at the edge of a cliff.

In the 1800s, the U.S. saw a boom in state institutions for the confinement of people with mental illness; every state had at least one by 1890. They were called lunatic or insane asylums, but the reasons for admission ranged from “brain fever” and “grief and anxiety” to “laziness,” “religious excitement” and ”desertion by husband,” according to historical records. Conditions varied, but some asylums gained reputations as brutal, overcrowded warehouses where patients were neglected and restrained. Asylums gradually became psychiatric hospitals, but practices didn’t necessarily improve: In the 1900s, they were the settings of since-discredited treatments including lobotomies and induced comas.
Above: The sleeping ward in the State Hospital for the Insane at Milledgeville, Ga., in the 1940s.

Research professor Dean Duncan and research associate Nancy Hagan partner with Jackson County to improve how the state acquires and keep foster parents.

The AAUP condemns the catastrophic faculty and staff layoffs enacted at the New School. A multimillion-dollar deficit—driven by years of corporate consultant overreach, poor executive decision-making, real estate debacles, and ever-bloating executive salary costs—is now being weaponized against faculty, staff, students, and the historic intellectual life of this university.

In the decade since Obergefell, court cases across the country have tried to overturn the right to same-sex marriage. Last fall, a case attempted to penetrate the Supreme Court, stoking panic that the Obergefell domino could indeed topple. In Davis v. Ermold, petitioner Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who had refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, asked the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell, claiming that it had “no basis in the Constitution.” She had been locked in a legal battle for almost a decade after being sued and jailed for refusing to issue the licenses, continually appealing the original case against her to request that the Court reconsider Obergefell.

A defendant stands in the dock. An expert describes them as a “psychopath”. In an instant, one word threatens to eclipse their history, circumstances and the crime itself. In Ireland, England and Wales, judges are not supposed to add years to a sentence because someone has been described as a psychopath. But the label can still enter criminal justice through expert reports, risk assessments, parole, mental disorder cases and preventive detention.

In an interview with Michelle Pauli, LSE HE Blog Fellow Tamas Dezso Ziegler and Anna Unger suggest how systemic barriers and administrative burdens reinforce the dominance of Western and Western European institutions while marginalising Eastern European and non-European scholars

A draft regulation under the Capital Law 2026 would allow Hanoi to create a dedicated social housing fund serving social welfare goals and addressing growing urban housing demand.

As part of its working visit to China, Chengdu University held a meeting, exchanged ideas, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Social Work Department of the Yantai Municipal Party Committee (China), opening up many opportunities for cooperation in education, social development, and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

What we’re living through right now is the long-term decline in world opinion about the United States, reaching back at least as far as the George W. Bush years and arguably all the way to the Vietnam War, hitting a kind of critical mass.

Funded doctoral students are researching how asylum law shapes LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, influences on adolescents with uncertain cancer prognoses, social service interventions for survivors of child labor in Zambia, and more.

Social care charity Turning Point Scotland said the “internationally proven model” would save lives. Patricia Tracey, head of alcohol and other drugs at the charity, said: “We will continue to call for improved harm reduction and recovery support for people who use drugs to reduce harm, prevent avoidable deaths and live fulfilling lives. Safer consumption facilities are an internationally proven model and can provide a vital service for people who face stigma and barriers to support, offering safety, dignity and an important pathway into treatment and recovery services.”

A newly identified group of amygdala neurons appears to play a central role in anxiety and social behavior. Restoring normal activity in this tiny brain circuit reversed anxiety and social deficits in mice, revealing a promising new target for future treatments.

Debbie Kilroy, Chief Executive of Sisters Inside, an Aboriginal-led organisation advocating for the human rights of women and girls in prison and their families, said elevating adoption in the permanency hierarchy would risk “repeating history. There is no way to separate adoption from the history of stolen generations,” she said.

In an era of poisonous politics, Democrats, Republicans, and independents have found common cause over the value of tax breaks worth billions to Big Tech companies worth trillions. What residents see in exchange are higher electricity and water rates, a paltry number of new permanent jobs, and a host of unsavory environmental impacts, from the desecration of green spaces, erasures of wildlife habitats, and air and noise pollution. The public outcry has had a serious impact: Across America, at least 25 different data center projects were canceled last year, and half of all data centers expected to open in 2026 will be delayed or simply canceled, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Above: Loudoun County has one of Virginia’s highest concentrations of data centers.

The Department of Health and Human Services is offering state child welfare agencies $6 million to pilot predictive analytics to assess children’s risk of abuse and neglect in the child welfare system, the Administration for Children and Families announced last week. The artificial intelligence push is part of the administration’s agenda to modernize the child welfare system and address the shortage of foster homes across the U.S. Although the hope is that the tools improve decisionmaking in the system, they’ve also been the subject of critiques about surveillance and bias.

When a child arrives in the emergency department at Children’s Nebraska, the visit is rarely simple. An incident may have happened at school, day care, or home. A baby’s illness may lead to concerns at home. A family may have to admit a child for treatment on a Monday and are facing eviction on Friday at the patient’s discharge. In those moments, Michelle Patton is there to help during somebody’s worst day.

In a context where careers depend on novel, significant findings, the same flexibility that produced innocent disagreement at a hackathon has far greater consequences. A researcher who needs a small p-value to complete a story may be swayed by an analytical pipeline that delivers it, without ever leaving the bounds of what the field considers methodologically acceptable. This is not fraud. It is the ordinary, unremarkable consequence of too many defensible choices and too little transparency about which ones were made and why. There is no need to fabricate data when the analysis does it for you.

Among all of the cohort’s outstanding accomplishments, Dr. Rice is most proud of the relationship the cohort has built between the new program and southwest New Brunswick’s social work community and clients. “I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback from the community about their work with our students,” he said.

Data centres are hungry for energy. The question is how that demand will be met.

Instead of targeting hunger, the experimental drug activates metabolism inside skeletal muscle. Researchers say this approach improved blood sugar regulation and body composition in animal studies while avoiding several side effects often linked to GLP-1 therapies, including appetite suppression, muscle loss, and digestive issues. The treatment is taken as a tablet rather than an injection.

Zaiden, 3, sits with his mother, Sarah, in the kitchen of their Springfield home. Their growing family took part in a pilot program that gave 132 families $500 a month for 18 months provided by the Children’s Trust of Massachusetts.

“For too long, Washington ignored how mass illegal immigration artificially suppressed wages, hurting working-class Americans – especially young men,” wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on X in July 2025. “But…, we now have a secure border, a blue-collar wage boom, and major investments from trade deals.” The labor market tells a different story. In the first year of Trump’s second term, unemployment rose, hiring slowed and wage growth stagnated.

Socialists have long predicted capitalism’s overthrow and replacement by a better system. But do we have any reason to believe capitalism must come to an end? Above: Unemployed workers line up for a free meal in Great Depression–era New York City, 1931.

“We’re seeing the resurgence of an ableist mindset — that your worth is tied to what you can produce,” said Ives-Rublee, MSW, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. “When you add more administrative hurdles or tie coverage to work requirements, you’re not promoting independence — you’re putting people at risk of losing the care that makes independence possible.”

The Tory Leader said she didn’t want her party to be ‘glorified social workers’

Sen. Bernie Sanders said his new bill would “guarantee that the trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us—not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”

Ward 86 at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where a social worker was stabbed in 2025. San Francisco officials pledged to spend $23 million to make city hospitals and clinics safer for health care workers.

After my parents’ tragic, untimely deaths, I began to teach—and learn alongside—my students about how our bodies can nourish the land after we die. What we saw empowered us all.

The administration has lost many court cases because it turns out that issuing executive orders doesn’t circumvent legal requirements, and the orders can be vacated if they lack strong justification. To avoid that same fate, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has decided to merge the executive order with other administration priorities and send it through the formal federal rulemaking process. The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science. Above: Russell Vought, director of the OMB

According to documents viewed by Science, all grants approved by NIH for funding are now going through an extra screening at its parent body, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Staffers there who may be political appointees and not necessarily subject matter experts sometimes ask for substantive changes in the research.

In an apartment in Sarajevo, the days unfold with school bags by the door, drawings scattered across the table, children’s laughter and evening routines slowly becoming part of a shared life. At first glance, it looks like many other family homes. But behind it is a slightly different story, a story about how much it means for children to grow up in a safe, warm and supportive family environment.

A recent parliamentary reply from Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube reveals a stark reality: just 761 social services professionals are left to cover South Africa’s entire public education sector, with further expansion blocked by tight budget caps. Compounding this financial freeze, critical regulations to formalise school social work have been stalled in administrative limbo since 2020, leaving overextended teachers to navigate a mounting classroom mental health crisis entirely alone. Above: More than 130 learners are packed into a classroom at Ntapane Junior Secondary School in the Eastern Cape.

The Gauteng Department of Social Development has introduced new funding clauses barring NPOs from using provincial grants to pay non-South African staff. The department says social work is not a scarce skill and it has a database of 2,000 unemployed South African social workers.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four people seeking to represent a class action for all others held at Camp East Montana, a 60-acre facility located in the Chihuahuan Desert on the grounds of Fort Bliss, an Army base and the site of one of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals were imprisoned during World War II. Approximately 2,500 immigrants are being detained there.

Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy. This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.